


The Lost Kings

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [11]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Genre: Backstory, Cunnilingus, Dyslexia, F/M, Gangs, Panic Attacks, Poe Dameron: Space Latino, Pregnancy, Relationship Negotiations, Slice of Life, Unsafe Sex, ethnic identities in space, spaceport living, star wars gangs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 13:43:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7224724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shara really wasn’t going to let herself think that probably her favorite thing about Kes was how sometimes he pretended to be asleep after they were done, so he’d have an excuse to stay. She’d told herself it was just that those dormitories weren’t very comfortable-- she’d know, she’d spent enough of her life in them-- but she knew he waited until she fell asleep and finger-combed the tangles out of her sex-wrecked hair, so gentle and soft she never felt it. She just knew he did, because her hair was sometimes magically better in the morning.<br/>He loved her, was the thing, and it was upsetting, and she didn’t like it. Except that she did, she loved it. It made her a bad person.<br/>It certainly wasn’t that she loved him. That wasn’t the kind of thing Shara Bey had time for. But she was lonely and he was such a good time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is not my most polished work, I wrote it mostly for myself, but there's been just enough interest that I figured I'd share it. Pardon my overuse of run-on sentences.  
> Chapter 1 is going up now, and chapter 2, which details how the courtship progressed, will go up soon-- my goal is to complete those sections at least before chapter 6 of Can't Go Home This Way goes up, because some of these events will be referenced. It doesn't matter what order you read the stories in, though!  
> There's more beyond that but I don't know how much will be told directly, and how much you'll only get in references from later events. We know how the story ends, and I don't necessarily want to tell it. That's the thing about canon gapfillers, yeah?  
> So anyway. This isn't a sweet story, but it should be entertaining.

Shara Bey had seen a lot of things in her twenty-two years in this galaxy. She’d been a pilot since she was a kid, she’d grown up mostly shipboard and she’d lived on dozens of worlds, and she’d always steered her own destiny, she and her papa together against the world.

Now she was out on her own, but that was only temporary-- she’d go back to her papa when this gig was over. But for now, she was on her own and she’d been enjoying living it up. There were a lot of opportunities available for a skilled pilot, especially one with a steady gig like this-- and it was a flashy gig, sweet and prestigious, flying courier runs for rich folks. Flashy livery, real sweet ships, she’d flown more yachts now than she could even count. And it paid well, so of course she was socking most of it away for the lean times, but there was plenty, for once, left over for her to keep a private room and eat good food and wear nice things.

And go out drinking and dancing and find exciting people to hook up with, at least once in a while, to keep the loneliness at bay.

So she’d seen a lot of things, and she wasn’t real impressed by much.

But this boy. How stupid was she, that her head was so turned by this boy?

She’d seen him earlier, loading cargo-- a wrench in his back pocket to hammer on the loading droids with, grease on his hands, his shirt clinging with sweat across a nice broad back, a capable grease-stained hand wrapped around a datapad with the loading manifest. The kind of person she saw every day in this kind of place, as much a part of the scenery as the vertigo-inducing sweep of space outside the shielded entryway to the port. Though, to be fair, he was a little more scenic than most— young, long-legged, broad-shouldered, with clear golden skin and a broad white smile.

She’d only really noticed him because he’d called out-- “Hey, there!”— in Iberican, and she’d thought at first he was talking to her, but he’d been yelling at his coworker. “Can’t you fucking read?” he’d asked, and his accent had been so thick, so crisp and Homeworldy, she’d smiled despite herself. His friend had answered him, indistinct and defensive, and he’d rolled his eyes, shaken his head, and had caught her looking at him. “What kind of loser is hung-over at noon?” he’d said conspiratorially, still in the mother tongue, and it was so long since she’d heard a pure accent like that, she couldn’t help but smile at him even though she never smiled at boys.

“I don’t know,” she’d answered him in Iberican, “maybe he was just trying to live his best life.” And she’d let her gaze linger just long enough to see the delight cross his pretty young face-- there weren’t many Ibericans in this sector, let alone this spaceport-- before she’d turned away as she kept walking.

And here he was in this little club, in a different shirt that was clean now but still tight enough that she could see how nice his back was, and she recognized him in profile, that same gorgeous jaw that had caught her eye out on the street. He had his head tilted to listen to his friend— a different one, not the illiterate one from earlier. This friend had tattoos on his face, and Shara set her mouth; they were definitely gang tattoos, but that was about the only reason there were ever any Ibericans around here. The Fronteras had formed a union of sorts when it came to cargo-loading; they were master logisticians, and across the galaxy if you had a complicated cargo that you needed well-handled, you dealt with whichever dock space the Fronteras controlled at that spaceport-- but it all intertwined with protection rackets, just like everything the gangs did, and it was only worth it some of the time, and of those times, a lot were drugs or smuggled goods.

It wasn’t that the Fronteras hadn’t helped Shara and her father out a time or two. They weren’t strictly a race-first group, but if you were Iberican they were generally friendlier to you than not. An Iberican papa and his little girl could at least count on hitching a ride somewhere, or being spared the protection fees. But they’d both been careful never to involve themselves too closely to the gang or any of its subsidiaries.

But her boy, the one who’d caught her eye, he didn’t have any visible ink. His shirt only had sleeves to the elbows; there were no markings on his forearms or hands, or on his face or neck. So she decided to chance it; he might be like her, relying on the gang’s protection to get work, but not a member himself.

“Is this you living your best life?” she asked him.

His face lit up before he even saw her, and he turned and grinned at her like she was a long-lost old friend. He was really unfairly beautiful, strong white teeth and lovely bone structure, and Shara already resented him a little for how many feelings he was making her feel despite herself. “Well,” he said, not even the slightest bit coy, and it startled her how fucking _refreshing_ that was, “I am now!”

“You know her?” the friend said, surprised. Shara looked at him more closely; she didn’t know him but the markings on his face were familiar enough, clan affiliations within the Fronteras. She’d worked for his clan before.

“I do now,” Pretty Boy said, and extended his hand. “Kes Dameron.”

“Shara Bey,” she said, taking his hand. His hand was big and callused, and he held hers with a gentle firmness as he smiled at her. He was so tall and well-built and his deep-set hooded eyes were a dark velvet brown and his face was so perfect she wanted to smack it. What a _jerk_.

“She’s a pilot,” the friend said. “Worked for us before. Real hot-shot.” He winked at her. “I’m Etto.”

Shara nodded at him, and got her hand back from Kes, and it was warmer than her other hand now. “I think we met,” she said. “My papa’s still flying freighters for your bosses.”

“Oh, yeah, ol’ man Bey,” Etto said, with a spark of genuine recognition. “Well, be careful, Kes, the thing about pilots is that they fly away, yeah?”

Kes fixed him with a polite stare, impressively compelling, and Etto rolled his eyes and melted away into the crowd. He turned back to her, milder and slightly amused. “It’s not my first time off-world,” he said. “Are you thirsty?”

 _Oh,_ Shara thought, _I’m thirsty all right._

 

About an hour later Shara sat back from where she was straddling his lap on the grungy couch in the corner and said, breathlessly, “Come back to my place.” It wasn’t that she wasn’t adept enough at getting what she needed out of encounters like this, and she certainly wasn’t in the habit of bringing men she’d known for an hour back to her safe space, but the way he used his mouth to kiss her, she knew he was the real deal. Also he was almost certainly younger than she was, and there was no way he wasn’t exactly what he said he was. He was not a man of guile, that was plain.

Also she wanted to check him for ink. She wanted to know if he was really Frontera’s, or if he just worked for them.

He looked a little dazed, and ran his tongue over his lower lip. His mouth was so pretty, and a little swollen from kissing. “You sure?” he said. “You barely know me.”

“You got somewhere better?” she asked. She doubted it. If he was working on the docks he was probably in a dormitory. She’d spent enough gigs living like that. Having her own space was a real luxury and she intended to make the most of it.

“No,” he admitted. “And believe me, I’d like to take this somewhere private.”

“I’m a big girl,” she said, “I’m not scared of you turning out to be a creep. I don’t usually take people home but I want to take my time with you, boy.”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” he said, mouth curving in delight.

 

She came on his fingers, pressed up against the inside of the door of her room, still in all her clothes, gasping and shuddering and biting down hard on the spot where his shoulder met his neck. “Fuck,” she panted, “oh-- fuck-- fuck--” She’d meant to get his shirt off him at least, make sure he didn’t have some giant mural across his chest of the Lost Kings of-- “Oh fuck,” she said, tipping her head back as he very gently started moving his hand again, his mouth hot at her ear, “Oh-- holy mother Nora,” she gasped, “oh-- oh my sweet fucking-- Boy! I have a bed! I have-- _oh_ ,” and she came again, a shuddery one that popped out into multiple little ripples like a sneezing fit, making her shudder and stealing her ability to make words.

Kes groaned into her ear, moving his hand in deft little twitches, merciless, his body pressed against her behind his hand, hot big solid shoulders, chest, thigh, breath on her neck, face by her face, he smelled of ozone and rum and soap. “Oh sweetheart,” he murmured, “oh, baby, I bet you taste so good right now, so sweet and so soft and if I keep doing this how long can you keep doing that?”

Shara shuddered and grabbed his forearm, needing him to stop. “Wait,” she said, “hold up, right there, don’t move.” She shuddered again, hard, a strong aftershock, and she was dimly aware that she had clamped down so hard on his fingers it was a wonder he could move them at all. “I don’t know how long I could keep doing that,” she said, mastering some kind of control over her mouth, if not her breathing yet, “but you might lose your fingers if you don’t let up.”

“I see that,” he said, breath hot in her ear. “Maybe we should go to your bed and see if I lose my tongue.”

“You seem remarkably unconcerned,” she said unsteadily. He kissed her neck and carefully, slowly pulled his fingers out, and she shuddered and bit his shoulder again.

“I got no real illusions about myself,” he said. “I’m not the kind of guy people keep around for his way with words. I’m willing to risk it.”

She laughed. “What about your dick, though?” she asked. “Would you risk that?”

“I mean, my dick mostly just gets me in trouble,” he said. “It would be sort of fitting, and only what it deserves.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’ll get your dick in trouble all right.” He grinned at her, and she shoved him back and led him down the short hallway past the fresher into her room. He wasn’t the first person she’d brought back here, but he was the first man. She didn’t own much, so there wasn’t much to clutter the place up.

He was licking his fingers, maybe a little showy about it, and she shoved his shoulder a little. “Patience,” she said.

“Can I,” he said, and reached for her shirt, but she blocked him and pulled his shirt off, up and over his head, and he was beautiful, all smooth cream-gold skin, and no tattoos-- and not much hair, and her impression that he was very young solidified. Sure, he was grown, but he had to be younger than she was. He had a tiny, carefully-maintained patch of beard, but basically nothing else besides the close-cropped hair on his head, and there were almost no lines around his eyes despite how much he smiled and how much sun he’d clearly been exposed to. He had actual tan lines, faint remainders of them, where he had clearly spent time under a yellow sun in a short-sleeved shirt, habitually, not all that long ago. He was a planetsider, for sure; spacers didn’t usually wind up muscled like that.

But no tattoos on his chest or upper arms. She unfastened his belt, fending off his hands when he reached for her shirt. He stopped trying, then, and obediently let her undress him, standing still as she paused to walk around him.

He did have a tattoo on his back, just between his shoulder blades, monochrome and intricate and as wide as her hand was long. There was a crown, one of the marks of the Frontera, over a small band of designs that she recognized as being associated with the rock carvings of the Lost Kings of Oaxctli. “It’s not a membership tattoo,” he said, turning his head a little to look indirectly at her. She touched the ink; it wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t faded yet either. “I don’t belong to the Fronteras. I just work for them. It’s a protection marker.”

She glanced up at his face and, oh. Looking at his profile, she could see it now. He had the distinctive look, the strong nose and chin-- he was from an Oaxctli bloodline, from one of the homeworlds bedecked with the stone carvings of those distinctive profiles. He was Vanished Nations, from the era before the Ibericans took to the galaxy at large in their sleeper ships.

“Lost Kings, hm?” she said, finishing her circuit around his body and coming back to stand in front of him.

He shrugged. “Papa was born in Xicul,” he said. Shara knew almost nothing about it, but she knew Xicul was one of the valleys with the stone faces. Everyone knew that.

“Why’d he leave?” she asked. She’d always figured if you had a planet you could belong to, you wouldn’t leave it, but obviously other people hadn’t felt the same.

“Planet’s dying,” Kes said, “there were landslides, the mining companies threw us out, there’s nothing to go back to.”

“So the only way to get work is Fronteras,” Shara said.

He nodded. “You gotta keep your eyes open,” he said, “but if you stay alert you can keep your hands clean. I don’t mind the honest work but I won’t touch the drugs or the slaves.”

“Do they listen to you, when you say that?” she asked skeptically. She’d tried being principled occasionally. The saving grace was, as a pilot, it wasn’t usually _her_ hands that had to get dirty. Nowadays she made it her business to retain plausible deniability about what was in the actual cargo.

“So far,” he said. “Most of what I earn I send to my mother and she keeps it safe for me, so if they try to force me, I have enough that I can afford to say no.” He shrugged. “We try to keep each other safe like that, a few of us.”

“A gang within the gang?” She hadn’t brought him back here for this level of discussion, but he was so serious, so focused, it was hard to look away from his face. He was so _pretty_ , and earnest on top of that, and it wasn’t _fair_.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “Family.” He brought his hand up to her face and pulled her in to kiss her, and she shivered at how soft and warm his lips were. “If you want in,” he said quietly, “we’d look after you too.”

“You don’t know me,” she said.

“I know you’re in the same spot I am,” he said. “Working for Fronteras but not part of Fronteras.”

“I didn’t bring you back here to talk about my professional situation,” she said, but smiled at him, and stepped back a little to pull her shirt off over her head.

“No,” he agreed, and sank gracefully to his knees in front of her, gazing up with an endearing combination of hopefulness and worshipfulness. “You brought me back here so I could eat your pussy.”

 

* * * 

 

“You didn’t come back last night,” Norasol said, and Kes grimaced guiltily, standing still a moment before slowly turning around. She’d appeared out of nowhere in the hallway of the dormitory, and he hadn’t seen her coming, but he was kind of used to that. It was more or less her normal mode of operation. He really should have expected this.

“No,” he said. “Did you--” She slept in the women’s dormitory, and he slept in the men’s, and on earlier postings together she’d mothered him excessively, but she’d backed off as he’d gotten older. Or so he’d thought. “If I knew you were waiting up I’d have sent a comm.” He was very, very, very aware that he was clearly wearing the same clothes he’d gone out in the previous night, and he clearly had not washed or shaved, and he probably had visible bruises on his neck because that woman liked to bite.

“Etto said you found a woman,” Norasol said, crossing her arms over her chest. She’d raised him just as much as his own mother had, and probably a bit more than his father. Kes had sort of always known that she’d been his mother’s lover when they were both young, before the landslides, before he was born, but he carefully didn’t know if that was still true, as it was information he _really_ didn’t need. She was sharp-tongued and quick-witted, knew various forms of magic, and knew things she couldn’t possibly, but mostly she was just so terrifying that no one ever tried to keep secrets from her. So she knew everything.

Even now, her eyes were following the edge of his jaw and taking in the marks he was sure were there. But more than that, he was pretty sure she was looking into his soul and finding all the things he hadn’t himself quite sorted out about what had happened.

“Yeah,” he said. “Etto knew her, and she speaks the mother-tongue. A pilot. She does courier stuff. Private corporations mostly.” He knew better than to look at his hands, or to fidget, or to look away.

“Flashy,” Norasol said. “It’s a glamorous job. Pays well. She must have her own place. And she took you back there, if you were out all night.” She gave a little sniff. “At least you weren’t fucking in alleys.”

“Auntie,” Kes said, scandalized.

“Oh don’t make that noise,” Norasol said. “You’re twenty years old, Kes.”

“I’m not an animal,” Kes said. Although. If Shara had wanted him to, he absolutely would have fucked her in an alley.

“I thought we had a chat about this,” Norasol said. “I thought we agreed you were going to stick to boys, on this trip.”

“You suggested that,” Kes corrected her, “and I told you I’d keep it in mind. I didn’t promise anything.” He managed not to roll his eyes, because he knew that would be a fatal mistake. “It’s not like I’d be any safer with boys.”

“You can handle yourself,” Norasol said, “I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about the fact that every girl you sleep with, you want to marry. And you’re _twenty_ , Kes, so of course they break your heart, and then I have to carry your mopey ass home and deal with your shit. Listen to me and don’t sleep with any more girls until you’re thirty.”

“What could that possibly fix?” Kes asked, too amused to be angry with her.

“It would fix your problem,” Norasol said, “because no girl wants to marry a boy of twenty, but a man of thirty, maybe that would be sensible behavior from.”

“That happened _one time_ ,” Kes said, squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t roll them. “And to be fair we’d dated for _four years_.”

“And this is how you get back on the ride,” Norasol said. “Your first time out, you go for a fancy courier pilot who is young and pretty and could have any man in any spaceport and probably _does_.”

That thought had crossed Kes’s mind, so it held no particular sting. Well. It did, but at least it wasn’t a surprise. “I’m aware of that,” he said.

“Ah,” Norasol said, pointing at him in celebration of some small obscure triumph. “So she _is_ pretty.”

Kes spread his hands out in an elaborate shrug. “You didn’t think she would be?”

“You know Etto has absolutely zero concept of feminine beauty,” Norasol said. It was true; Etto was gay as hell and pretty infatuated with Kes and it really wasn’t as flattering as it might otherwise have been and was honestly getting sort of old. At least Etto wasn’t a creep, he was just kind of annoying. Norasol was insistent that Kes should fuck Etto, and Kes just— it wasn’t that Etto had anything particularly wrong with him, he just wasn’t _into_ him like that, and it was his least favorite conversation topic at this point.

“Do you think I’d go for someone I didn’t at least find attractive?” Kes asked, baffled.

“Well, no,” Norasol said, “but that’s not the same thing.”

Kes squinted at her. “What’s the difference?”

“Give it a few years,” Norasol said, “you’ll understand.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, and then remembered that he was standing in the hallway of the dormitory at six in the morning on his day off and he’d had very little sleep and a lot of errands to run. “So, um. Am I getting yelled at, or was that all?”

“Oh,” Norasol said, and he’d fucked up, for sure, that had been the wrong thing to say, for sure, _damn_ it. “You’re getting yelled at.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t want you to see this girl again.”

The urge to roll his eyes was so powerful that Kes nearly passed out, but he managed to quell it and just stare at Norasol, though his eyes might have bugged out a little. “Auntie,” he said, “I am twenty years old. We are together on this gig to make sure neither of us gets our organs sold, not because I need a chaperone.”

“It is at least twenty percent because you need a chaperone,” Norasol said, unmoved by his mighty effort not to roll his eyes at her. (Rolling one’s eyes at Norasol was certain doom. He had learned this very young and was still missing a piece of his soul, he was pretty sure. He’d counted himself lucky to have escaped still breathing.)

“ _Auntie_ ,” he said helplessly.

“Don’t pass out,” Norasol said, which was a running joke between the two of them, and not at all funny. “I want to meet her. If she will meet with me then you can see her again. Otherwise, absolutely no.”

Kes stared at her, and thought about what precisely it would entail to convey to an ultra-cool courier pilot that his auntie insisted on meeting her prior to the next booty call. He was under no illusions that he was any more than that to her, and there was no universe in which this would not be met with the ridicule it absolutely deserved.

“No,” he said. “No, Norasol, I am not making her meet with you.”

Norasol stared him down, and he set his jaw and stared back. It was ridiculous. He understood; she’d been looking out for him ever since he was old enough to go out on work gigs like this. But in the eyes of his people he’d been a man for four years now, and it was ridiculous for her to expect him to act like they were back home in the village. (Even then, he knew firsthand, there was a lot of fucking around on the sly.)

Suddenly she smiled. “I’m proud of you,” she said, and uncrossed her arms, reaching out to pat his cheek with one of her hands. “Telling me no. That’s my boy, Kes.”

He blinked. “What?”

“It was a test,” she said. “It would have been ridiculous for you to agree with me. You’re wrong, though.”

“What?” he asked again, completely confused.

“Don’t worry your pretty head,” she said. “Go and take a nap, we have errands to run this afternoon and I can’t have you a fucked-out mess like this.”

“I’m,” Kes said, spurred to indignation, but then recognized a rare escape opportunity, and took it.

 

 

Shara stood with her datapad in her hand, waiting for the mechanic to sign off on the return inspection. At least the harbormaster’s assistant had signed off promptly on the bill of lading. This was just the livery company, ensuring that the ship’s condition was all accounted for. It was routine but she was just so damn tired.

She had a lot of experience at standing around with her eyes turned off from the inside, though, so she went into a patient waiting trance, with her gaze distantly focused on the man who was going down the checklist. She tuned out almost everything of her surroundings, and so she was only dimly aware of the person who had sidled up to stand next to her until the woman cleared her throat.

Shara blinked, refocused, and turned her head. The woman next to her was about her height, solidly built, and was watching her keenly. She also did not have a datapad or anything official in her hand. She was dressed like a harbor worker, in a respectable but slightly-grimy shirt with the spaceport administration’s logo stitched onto a patch on one shoulder.

She also had a distinctive sharp profile, black hair, black eyes, and Shara said, “Let me guess. Dameron.” She absolutely had not expected this, but then, he’d said to her that he wasn’t here alone. And he was young. He was certainly someone’s baby. This wouldn’t be his mother, though she was probably old enough if he was as young as he looked.

“I’ve been known to go by that name,” the woman said, in Iberican, sure enough same accent as Kes.

Well. He’d been fun, and she’d been planning to comm him tonight and see if he wanted to come over, because he’d _really_ been a good time, but it wasn’t going to be worth family drama. Shara had gone quite long enough in her life without family drama, she wasn’t starting now. (Not even for _that_ good a time. He was _such_ a good time. She’d come so many times. On his fingers, on his tongue, on his cock. She’d gone hoarse and forgotten her own name. She’d never had anyone find all her hot buttons so quickly. It was horrifyingly unfair.)

“Interesting,” Shara said. She’d leave it at that and walk away, but she had to stand here and wait for the sign-off, so she was effectively trapped.

The woman surely knew that.

Great.

“I told him I wouldn’t allow him to see you again unless I met you first,” the woman said.

“ _Wow_ ,” Shara said, “I figured he was young but I hadn’t realized he was that young. I hope I wasn’t in violation of any laws.” Surely he wasn’t _that_ young. He couldn’t _possibly_ be, with shoulders like that.

The woman chuckled, honest to god actually chuckled, like this was a holodrama. “He’s probably a year or two younger than you are,” she said. “And he told me I was being ridiculous, and he was right, so he passed that test. But it made me curious because I think that’s the first time he’s ever bothered defying me, I terrorized him so when he was a child.”

“You’re not his mother,” Shara hazarded, giving the woman a sidelong look. If only this were about literally anything else, she would kind of like this woman, might be friends with her, would certainly collaborate with her.

“No,” the woman said. “I’m Norasol. I’m his auntie.” The way she said it, Shara understood that she didn’t mean by blood. Norasol was an old-fashioned name, like an old magic woman in a holodrama, not the kind of thing a young or even middle-aged woman would name herself. Shara gave the woman another sidelong look. It was the kind of name an old Homeworld planetside witch would absolutely take, and keep, though.

She would _definitely_ be this woman’s friend if it weren’t that she was apparently here to meddle about the bad news beautiful boy. But this possibly meant this woman was going to hex her or something, and she did not need that kind of thing in her life. She didn’t believe in it per se, but all pilots were superstitious, and all spacers intimately knew what kind of razor’s edge of probability they were kept alive by. Nobody liked hexes. Nobody liked to piss off witches.

“Well,” Shara said, “he’s a lovely boy, but I don’t want to interfere in anyone’s family business. If you see him you can tell him you spoke to me and I wish him well.”

“I assume you have his comm address,” Norasol said, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t want to interfere in anyone’s family business,” Shara repeated lightly. “If you’re warning me off, I’ll take the warning and be grateful.”

“Oh,” Norasol said, “I’m not warning you off. I was just curious. I’ve never tested Kes before, and he’s never defied me, so I wanted to see what you were, that would inspire him so.”

“What I was,” Shara said, giving Norasol another sidelong look.

Norasol shrugged. “Lots of things you could be,” she said. “A pretty human woman is nearly the least dangerous.” She closed one eye. “I’d love to read your palm but perhaps that should wait until we know one another a little better.”

“Don’t hex me if I don’t comm him,” Shara said, frowning.

Norasol laughed. “I won’t promise anything,” she said. “I never promise anything unless I know I can deliver it.” She closed one eye again. “But I’m probably more likely to hex you if you _do_ , understand. Because I imagine you’ll likely hurt him, and it would do less damage if it just happened now.”

“So you _are_ warning me off,” Shara said. She should just delete his comm address and be done with it. She should do it now, in front of this meddling woman. But a man who could use his fingers like that deserved, maybe, to have a little leeway in family drama. And he was so damn sweet. And she was so damn lonely.

 _What are you thinking_ , she asked herself. _Orgasms are just orgasms. You can give them to yourself._

 _Not like_ that _I can’t_ , she counter-argued.

 _This is stupid and shallow and you are better than this_ , she said.

 _He’s the first person that’s made you feel alive since you left your father behind_ , she countered, and it was a damn compelling argument.

“No,” Norasol said. “You need to follow your heart, young lady. I’m just here to satisfy my paranoia, not to meddle. It’s a big galaxy and there are a lot of things that would love to wreck a sweet open-hearted boy, just for kicks.”

Shara considered that. “Would I?” she asked. She didn’t know anything about sweet open-hearted boys. She’d never been any of those things.

“No,” Norasol said. “Not for kicks. By accident, maybe, but there’s no insurance against that.”

The mechanic came over with the checklist, and Shara gritted her teeth at his smug expression and got ready to argue, but as soon as she pointed out the notations from the inspection before her departure, where all the ship’s pre-existing damage had already been tallied, he went all agreeable, agreed to the fuel-conservation bonus she certainly deserved, and tacked on a ship-condition bonus she wasn’t sure she warranted. It wasn’t like she’d brought the ship back _nicer_ than when she’d left, she just hadn’t made it worse. But she’d take it.

Shara looked around as she signed off, but Norasol was gone.

She took it as a sign, and sent the boy a comm.

 

 

Shara had planned on playing it cool, and just fucking him some more, but she couldn’t help herself. She opened the door and Kes was there, all clean-limbed white-toothed clean-cut deliciousness, and she stood back to let him in, and instead of just pushing him against the inside of the door like she wanted to, she stood a pace away and bit her lip and said, “I met Norasol.”

“Fuck,” he said, annoyed, “did she track you down?”

“I mean,” Shara said, “it wasn’t difficult, my name is on the manifests.”

She could see instantly that hadn’t occurred to him, and she watched his expression change as he realized that he easily could stalk her by that same method, that he’d like to do that, and within half a second, the realization that he shouldn’t swept across his face. “That’s no excuse,” he said, and she knew then, he’d never lied to anyone in his life.

He was simple, but he wasn’t stupid. He just hadn’t encountered it before.

He was surrounded by older people who loved him and had sheltered him; he’d grown up as a treasured, desired child centered in a community that had very much wanted him. He was everything Shara wasn’t. And it didn’t make her despise him, to realize that, and that was probably a problem.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “She knows the old magics, doesn’t she?”

Kes mirrored the shrug right back at her, though his was less dismissive and more embarrassed. “Doesn’t everybody know somebody who does?”

“No,” Shara said.

“Oh,” he said. His expression drew in a little, more guarded. “She wouldn’t curse you,” he said. “It’s-- it’s not free. To do that. It hurts you to hurt someone.” He looked apologetic. “I mean. You probably know that. But a lot of times the-- the Basicos don’t know that.” His expression pinched even more. “Not that you’re.”

“I know,” she said, ending his agony. “I’m not a Basico. But I’m not from a place like you. I’m not from anywhere. I only ever had just my Papa. I don’t know about families.”

“We made our family,” he said, frowning intently. “Ours was broken too. We made a new one. Most of us died leaving Xicul, before I was even-- thought up. There was a lot of hunger. People starved, others were shot, we’re what’s left. You don’t need blood to make a family.”

“I know that,” Shara said. “So Norasol said she wasn’t warning me off. She just wanted to be sure-- what I was.” She stumbled over the phrasing a little.

Kes’s expression cleared, went blank. “Oh,” he said. Oh. He understood that. He understood Norasol’s motivation.

“I don’t know what that means,” Shara said, frustrated.

“She was making sure you were-- what you claim to be,” he said. “She-- I thought she was just telling me she doesn’t trust me to look after myself. But--” He bit his lip, squinting uncertainly at Shara. “It’s a big galaxy. And we’re far from home.”

“And you’re twenty-one years old,” Shara said, and saw his expression, and corrected herself. “Twenty.” Two years younger. It shouldn’t matter, but two years ago, Shara herself had still been pretty dumb.

“Twenty,” he confirmed, grimacing slightly. “Twenty-one soon.”

“Do they figure you’re an adult at sixteen?” Shara asked. He nodded. “Us too,” she said. “Not that there was much fuss. Like I said, it’s only me and my pop, in our little, ah, village.”

“Where’s your pop now?” Kes asked.

“Flying freighters for the Essin clan of the Frontera,” Shara said. “Based out of Hosnia. I got the flashier gig, but we’ll meet up again at the end of the cycle, when our contracts are up.”

Kes nodded. “Our contracts are one cycle too,” he said. “We generally keep moving. If you stay too long they want you to join the gang properly. We want to stay free from that.”

“Same here,” Shara said.

He raised his eyes to her, and she could actually feel where he was about to tell her she could join them, and she watched him bite it off and look back down. “So I,” he said, and trailed off.

“Did you want to fuck?” Shara asked. “Because I asked you here because that’s what I want.”

He looked up at her, face lighting up. “Yes,” he said.

 

He got her off so thoroughly with his hands and his mouth that she was completely sated, overstimulated and shaky. She hauled him up and kissed him, and he kissed her face and her hands and her breasts and she shivered and curled against his chest until she calmed down, and he seemed to think that was fine and they were finished. But she knew he hadn’t come, and when she had mastery of her limbs again she reached down and found that he was still wearing his underwear, still hard as a rock and surely aching.

“Don’t you need,” she said, but wasn’t sure how to put it.

He kissed her neck and her shoulder. “I can take care of myself if I really have to,” he said, “but it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Let me.”

He kissed her neck again, and seemed genuinely unconcerned. “It’s all right,” he said. “You seem done.”

She squeezed him through his underwear and his hips hitched, eyebrows pulling together a little. “No,” she said, “I want to.”

His expression was so good, his eyes glazed behind those heavy lids, his mouth soft and open, that she took her sweet time so she could watch him react. She touched him slowly and deliberately, alternating gentleness and firmness, taking him apart a little at a time and watching him lose composure and control. He shivered, arching into her touch, gasping desperately, and she kept him on the edge for a long time as he shook and panted.

He didn’t try to take over, though, didn’t try to take more than she gave, but left himself at her mercy. She finally took pity on him and got him off, and he cried out and buried his face in her shoulder and came long and hard, shuddering and shuddering and making delicious little whimpering sounds.

“Mmm,” she sighed, wiping her hand off on the sheets, she’d have to wash them anyway. “You’re so good.”

He made a wordless, plaintive little noise, and wrapped his arms around her. She cradled his head against her chest, carding her fingers through his thick soft short hair, and fell asleep, satisfied.

 

 

“Papa,” Shara said, delighted, as the holo of her father’s face skittered into focus. It was expensive, to use the long-range comm suite like this, but they’d coordinated it, she and Papa, and they’d decided ahead of time that it was worth the splurge.

“My baby girl,” Papa said, grinning at her. He looked good, and sounded like himself, and she clasped her hands in front of her mouth and tried not to cry.

She was dressed up for this, had done her hair and put lipstick on so she’d show up well on the holocorder, was wearing her nicest jacket so he’d see how well she was doing here and not worry. He looked like he’d just shaved, too. “Oh, Papa, you look so good,” she said.

“Shara, girl,” he said, “you dressed up like this is a date!”

“It is a date,” she said. “With my number one guy.”

“How is it out there?” he asked. “Are you lonely? I wish you weren’t so far away.”

“I’m okay, Papa,” she said. “Some of the other couriers are all right.” And she considered it, almost thought better of it, and then said, “There’s a nice boy I hang out with sometimes.”

“Oh,” Papa said, “oh no, a boy?”

She laughed. “He’s here working with his auntie,” she said. “Ibericans, exiles from Xicul. He looks like one of the stone carvings, Papa,” and she traced her nose, imitating the long graceful curve of Kes’s nose in profile. “When he speaks Basic he has an accent!” She hadn’t heard Kes speak Basic until she’d known him for a while, and it had been so jarring; he spoke Basic like the fake-Iberican gangsters in Coruscant holodramas, sharp and sibilant. It shouldn’t have been charming, but it was.

“Is he in the gang?” Papa asked, wary.

She shook her head. “Under their protection, he and his auntie, but they aren’t members. Same as us sometimes.”

Papa nodded. “Still,” he said. “Be careful, you know?”

“I know,” she said. “But he’s a little bit of fun, at least.”

“You’re enjoying having a private room,” Papa said.

Shara laughed. “Maybe a little,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger close together in front of her eye.

“Just be careful,” Papa said.

“I’m always careful, Papa,” Shara said.

 

She couldn’t decide which thing she liked the best about Kes. The fact that he seemed to view eating her pussy as the most profound form of worship available to him was high on the list; he would go at it with a reverential devotion that rapidly escalated in intensity to a level she’d assume was unsustainable except how he generally sustained it for improbable periods of time, his mouth and his fingers and his jaw working in a devoted concert to the point that she lost track of what he was doing specifically, and would just ride an endless crest of sensation until she was wrung out and panting.

She also liked that he didn’t seem to consider putting his dick in her as something that was his due. He always, always waited for her to ask for it, never demanded attention, always let her instigate anything. In fact, he asked permission before just about anything-- if not in words, then by a particular wordless hesitation. Every time. Even kissing. He always waited for her to indicate that she wanted it.

She also liked his dick, though, was the thing. It was big but not unwieldy, and he seemed to have made a map of her hotspots and took it into consideration in all dick-related maneuvers. She’d never come just from penetration before, but within a couple of minutes of first contact with his dick he’d figured out how to get her to come on his cock hands-free. It was unreal. She was starting to worry she’d be ruined for anyone else. It was so easy with him, never frustrating, and she definitely never had to take care of herself.

He always asked permission before he came, too, whether they were using a condom or not. (She always used condoms. Except he’d made a point of telling her about his medical records, and the third night he spent at her place, she only had two condoms in the place and they used them both and then she woke up horny and climbed onto his morning wood and rode him so hard she got off three times and when he gritted his teeth and tried to hold off, so pretty, she told him not to worry about it. And after that he’d eaten her out so good she came like five more times and completely wrecked her hair, and it was so good she just kept forgetting to get more condoms, and he confessed he honestly didn’t know where to buy them here. She’d been on the contraceptive shot pretty much nonstop since she’d begun menstruating, even before she’d been sexually active, because she was not going to get trapped by her own body, so it really didn’t matter, and just like that, one of her lifelong rules fell by the wayside.)

She really wasn’t going to let herself think that probably her favorite thing about him was how sometimes he pretended to be asleep after they were done, so he’d have an excuse to stay. (Even though she’d never kicked him out. She kept him around for morning sex. He didn’t have to pretend. But it was so cute when he did.) She’d told herself it was just that those dormitories weren’t very comfortable-- she’d know, she’d spent enough of her life in them-- but she knew he waited until she fell asleep and finger-combed the tangles out of her sex-wrecked hair, so gentle and soft she never felt it. She just knew he did, because her hair was sometimes magically better in the morning. (And sometimes he combed her hair when they woke up, if there was time, and he had patient deft practiced hands, like someone from a big family who’d done a lot of the work of caring for long-haired children.)

He loved her, was the thing, and it was upsetting, and she didn’t like it. Except that she _did,_ she _loved_ it. It made her a bad person.

It certainly wasn’t that she loved _him_. That wasn’t the kind of thing Shara Bey had time for. But she was lonely and he was such a good time.

 

 

The planet wasn’t bad, as planets went, but Shara noticed that Kes seemed unimpressed. It had a nice yellow sun and some pretty flowers, and Shara watched the wind in the scrubby little trees for a while and thought about how it would feel to fly a nice A-wing through there. Most of her in-atmo flying lately had been on simulators, and she missed real air.

Kes pulled out a scrap of flimsi when they got to the market, and Shara peered over at the spiky, cryptic writing. “A shopping list?” she said.

He grinned a little sheepishly. “Norasol had planned to come along,” he said, “but she was nice enough when I told her I wanted to take you instead that she just sent me with a list.”

“Is she nice to you usually?” Shara asked. She was a little fascinated by Norasol, and wanted to know her, and mostly was entranced at the idea of having— relatives who weren’t a parent, what that even meant. Norasol was clearly not Kes’s mother, nor was she his sister, but she was undeniably family.

“No,” Kes said. “Oh. Let me tell you one piece of advice. Do not ever roll your eyes at Norasol. She will curse you and you will never feel quite right again.”

“Is she really a witch?” Shara asked.

Kes gave her a sidelong look, and his mouth curved. “No,” he said, “but— well, yes.”

“That’s a great answer,” Shara said.

He shrugged. “It’s the truth,” he said. “You get used to it.”

Most of the things on the list were things that Shara had never even heard of, herbs and plants and things, and Kes gave the market stalls a thin-lipped once-over. “The weather shifted to autumn,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Most of this stuff’s gone out of season now.”

“Out of season,” Shara said, trying to parse what that meant.

“Yeah,” he said, and only after a moment did he slide her a glance. “Because the plants only grow in the summer.”

Shara had never really considered this before. “Oh,” she said. “And it’s autumn now.”

Kes nodded, and went back to inspecting the bundles of herbs on offer. Almost everywhere Shara had ever lived, anything green was prohibitively expensive so she didn’t bother looking at it. She had money now, and these green things weren’t all that expensive, but she had no idea what they were for. They seemed too small to eat.

Kes made his obscure selections, by what criteria Shara couldn’t begin to suss out, and wrapped them securely with a practiced hand before stowing them in his shoulder bag. He shrugged as he walked away from the vendors. “She’ll be annoyed,” he said, “and won’t believe me that there wasn’t any better a selection, but I bet you anything she forgot it’s autumn here too.”

Shara was more interested in the part of the market where they sold clothing and food. She loaded up her bag with the sliced preserved fruits that cost five times as much up on the space station, and ten times as much at the more remote stations. Kes bought a small bag of them too, but he seemed less interested. At the clothing stalls, Shara pointed out a nice quilted jacket that would suit Kes much better than the slightly-battered one he was wearing, whose sleeves were too short.

“This one will do,” he said. “I don’t need to collect more stuff to carry.”

“But a pretty boy should dress pretty,” Shara said. It was a nice jacket, dark red, and the color suited Kes beautifully. But he wouldn’t even try it on, though his fingers lingered on it a little.

He smiled. “I don’t need to,” he said. “I’m saving my money for something better.”

“Oh?” Shara asked, and walked with him to the next stall. “What?”

“Freedom,” he said.

“Whose freedom?” she asked, interested. She had a few friends who’d had to buy their families out of slavery here or there, and it was always dramatic. She used to pretend to herself that someday she’d be a big hero and end slavery somehow, but most of the fantasies were vague and nebulous. With the Empire firmly installed, it was even less likely. They were against a lot of stuff, but slavery wasn’t on their hit list.

“All of us,” Kes said. “All the survivors. Our family. We’re all pooling our savings and we’re going to buy land together, somewhere.”

“Survivors,” Shara said.

“Of Xicul,” Kes said. “Before I was born, the landslides?”

Shara shook her head. She didn’t know what he meant.

“The mining company owned most of the planet,” Kes explained, “and they told us the land wasn’t safe anymore, but we didn’t want to leave the valleys where our ancestors’ kings were carved, you know?”

“Oh,” Shara said. Maybe she’d heard something about that. “I think-- there were landslides, yeah.”

“Yeah,” Kes said. “A lot of people died, and the mining company said we had to get off the land, it wasn’t safe. They had to drive us out, and there was a fight, and in the end they gave the ones who survived some money and made us leave the planet.” Kes stopped and looked over at the scrubby trees again.  “But it wasn’t enough money to buy any land anywhere, so we pooled it together and we’re saving it, and everything we can earn on top of that, and then we’re going to buy a new place to live.”

Shara hadn’t understood that, from what he’d said before. “Oh,” she said. “Wow. That sounds-- nice.”

He smiled, a little shyly. “I’ve been working toward it my whole life,” he said. “My mother, she got hurt, she can’t work, but she keeps-- we have a home base, one farm, and we cram as many of us in as we have to, and the young ones stay with her and they keep the seeds growing, keep the livestock bloodlines alive, on that little farm, while the rest of us are out working and making money where we can.”

“Oh,” Shara said. “So when you said you send your money home to your mother, you meant it.”

“I did,” he said.

“Do you know what planet you’re going to settle on?” Shara asked, really curious. Livestock. It sounded unreal.

He shook his head. “We have a list,” he said. “It’s a short list. There are a couple of deciding factors. We don’t care where it is, it can be Outer Rim as long as it’s somewhere we can protect ourselves. But the climate has to be suitable. We don’t want to have to change what we grow. The point is to keep our old ways, if we can. It’s why we’ve kept the seeds planted for so long, to collect more-- so we can grow our traditional foods and observe our traditional seasonal festivals and all that stuff.”

“It sounds lovely,” Shara said, surprising herself. Seasonal festivals. Just like something being out of season. She hadn’t ever really known that plants only grew at one time. In her experience, planets were one kind of weather. She knew what a season was, academically, but she just-- hadn’t realized what the season words really meant.

Kes beamed at her, a sweet almost-embarrassed smile. “I go on about it a lot,” he said. “I don’t mean to. People usually laugh. I just-- I mean, it’s what I’ve been working on my whole life.”

“How many of you are there?” Shara asked.

Kes shrugged. “A lot have kind of split off,” he said. “There are probably only about thirty of us left, in our group. But we hope that when we get the land, we’ll get some back. Or maybe other people will join us. As long as they’ll help plant and harvest, we don’t care who they are.” And he slid her a strange little look, and bit his lip.

Shara considered for a moment how perfectly useless a lifelong spacer would be at trying to grow plants, and decided to ignore what hadn’t really been an invitation. Kes was far too interested in her, and it wasn’t going to last, and she should be a little colder to him. But she was so lonely, and he was so sweet, and she couldn’t bear to push him away.

A few more months, at least. Maybe she’d keep track of his comm address. He could be good to know. At least she’d want to know how the story ended, because it was hopelessly romantic to think of the Lost Kings of the Oaxctli, personified in this boy with a face like the stone kings, finding a new homeworld.

“C’mon,” she said, “I’ll buy you dinner at the fancy place, I’ve been dying to take somebody here. It’s not the same if you go by yourself.”

“I can’t believe you couldn’t find a date,” Kes said.

“Not one I liked,” she said.

 

“This is the longest I’ve been in your company at a stretch without climbing onto your dick,” Shara murmured in his ear as they boarded the shuttle back up to the space station. She was holding his hand. She didn’t usually go for that sort of shit, but she’d grabbed onto him in the crush of people so as to have his weight to brace against, and his hand was so warm and she fit so nicely tucked up against his shoulder and she was just a little bit horny now, and she wanted to be next to him.

Kes laughed and glanced down at her. “I mean,” he said, “it’s maybe my best feature but it’s not my only feature.”

“That’s true,” she said, and tilted her face up, and he smiled down at her but he didn’t take the bait and kiss her. He was watching the other people boarding the crowded shuttle, expression pleasantly neutral but a little forbidding, and his arm was around her back to keep her from getting jostled. It was almost protective of him, but not offensively so. Shara was surprised that she liked it.

He was big and substantial enough that people got out of his way and let him have two seats together; he eased through the press and pulled her through after him, and they sat together, and she pressed closer against his side than she strictly needed to. He kept his eyes out on the crowd, but smiled at her when she looked up at him; he was still looking politely neutral and forbidding, and it made him look older and ageless.

More like the stone kings of the valley, and Shara reached up and touched his face, tracing his cheekbone with her thumb as she thought about it. He was so very much the opposite of her; he was from somewhere, of a people, tied to the land, a creature of sunlight and earth. He smiled without looking down, and she ran her thumb over his lower lip, then dropped her hand to his chest.

Shara knew she was spacer trash. Her own mother hadn’t wanted her, had run off within a week of her being born and left Papa alone with her. Papa was spacer trash too, he had no family, no land, no people, no origin. They only had each other, and that had always been enough. Shara had never been worried overmuch about being Less Than anybody.

Kes made her feel like she was missing something, though. And then he was so clearly in love with her, and that made no sense. She had nothing to offer a farmer’s child, a scion of a lost race, a people’s generation of hope. The favorite treasured son born in exile who was going to lead them to a new paradise. He was every myth from every old holodrama, all wrapped up. And it made no sense that he would find anything to admire in a glitzy shallow cheap flash of spacer trash. Shara was a courier pilot, sure. She had cash and flash and a hard mean cynical streak, and she’d killed men for putting their hands on her, and she’d seduced innocent country girls into bed, and she’d only wreck someone as pretty and pure and destiny-struck as Kes.

She wasn’t the heroine of this narrative, that was for sure.

“Shara Bey,” a voice said, and she looked up from her absent contemplation of her hand on Kes’s chest to see Neeno Atta, another of the courier pilots she rotated with. He was an Abednedo, and they’d copiloted a couple times. She liked him, but she didn’t trust him much.

She didn’t trust many people, though.

She grinned up at him. “Hey Neeno,” she said. “You been takin’ in the sights down here too?”

“I had errands to run,” Neeno said, hefting a bag. “Who’s your pal here?”

“This is Kes Dameron,” she said. “Kes, this is Neeno, we fly together sometimes.”

Kes extricated his hand from the strap of his bag and greeted Neeno politely. “Good to meet you,” he said, and his Basic was sharp and sibilant, so different from his fluid Iberican.

“You a pilot too, man?” Neeno asked, and there was something a little too eager in his interest that made Shara bristle internally.

“No,” Kes said, “no, I work for the harbormaster. Logistics, you know. Cargo loading.” It wasn’t that he wasn’t fluent in Basic; he was, but he had a definite, distinctive accent. It was jarring, because it was so utterly opposite of how his accent felt in Iberican.

“Ahh,” Neeno said. “That’s hard work, man.”

“Yeah,” Kes said, “I don’t mind it, at least it’s honest work.”

Neeno laughed. “He’s adorable, Shara,” he said. “I gotta say, I heard a rumor you’d found yourself a sugar daddy, but I see that’s not the case.”

Shara didn’t look at Kes’s face, but kept her eyes on Neeno. “You think I need a sugar daddy?” She laughed. “I guess you don’t realize how those bonuses add up if you actually qualify for them every time. The last thing I need is a sugar daddy.”

It was true; she was an exceptionally efficient flier and she always got the fuel-conservation bonuses. Neeno liked to fly flashy, and he always burned through the fuel margin and often damaged the craft in minor but expensive ways. (Everything about spacecraft was expensive.) It meant Neeno sometimes got requested for jobs by people who liked his style, but Shara had more reliable long-distance work with sensible clients.

“Well,” Neeno said, flapping a hand and twitching his whiskers, “Miss Fancy Pantsy, you’d think you’d spring for some real arm candy in that case.”

“I think he’s a bit too gourmet for your tastes,” Shara said, sparing Kes a glance. He looked more than ever like he was carved from stone. “I don’t think you have the necessary background to see what’s so special about this one. It doesn’t matter anyway.” She gave Neeno a big, wide, predatory smile, and slid her arm around to close her fingers around the back of Kes’s neck, spreading her other hand across his chest. “He’s mine.”

It startled her, how _good_ it felt to be territorial about Kes. She wanted to claim him. It was unsettling. He was very still under her hands, but she could feel his heartbeat under her fingertips, steady and reassuring.

“I could probably find you a friend, though, if you wanted,” Kes said lightly to Neeno. “I’ll ask around, if you’re looking.”

Shara spared a moment to smile at him before looking back to Neeno. “No, no, Kes,” she said, “Neeno was looking for a sugar daddy. He’d have to look elsewhere for that.”

“That’s true,” Kes said.

“When you get a good one, though,” Shara said, “let me know where the party is. I’ll pay my own way but only if it’s cool.”

Witty repartee was kind of currency among Abednedos. Neeno acknowledged the hit and wiggled his whiskers, more friendly. “Fair point,” he said. “I’m not throwing a party unless it’s cool, come on, Bey, you know that literally all I have going for me is my killer sense of style.”

“That is true,” Shara said. “I don’t know if style points make up for how you trash nice ships, though. You don’t deserve nice things, Neeno.” She petted Kes’s chest. “I get nice things because I know how to take care of them.”

 

“I’m sorry I called you a thing,” she managed to say as she closed the door of her room behind her, and Kes laughed, setting his bag down on the end table and drawing a cup of water from the little tank of it she kept.

“It’s all right,” he said, “I’ll be a nice thing for you to keep any time. Sorry if I was embarrassingly uncool in front of your friend.”

“Oh no,” Shara said, “he was impressed.” Kes rummaged in his bag and pulled out the little green things he’d bought for Norasol, partly unwrapping them and sticking them cut ends downward into the cup of water. He set it on the end table next to the lamp, then turned to look at her.

“I’d better earn my keep, then,” he said, and grinned.

 

She slid her fingers around the back of his neck and curled her nails in, digging into his skin, pinning him into position, and his eyes went wide and dazed. She held him still and worked herself along his length, taking what she needed, bucking and shivering and keening. After she’d ridden out most of the cresting waves of orgasm, she realized she had blood on her hand, under her nails, where she’d broken his skin.

Still panting, she grabbed him by the hair, made him look her in the face, gritted out, “Mine,” and he cried out helplessly and came inside her.

 

She dozed, a little, but woke to him sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling his socks on. “I should go,” he said. He never said that sort of thing. “I have to-- the plants will wilt, I have to get them back to Norasol.”

“Okay,” she said sleepily. She sat up on her elbow to kiss him goodbye, and he kissed her perfunctorily and left. As she sat up to turn the lamp off, a sticky gob of his seed slid out of her and made her shiver. She went to the fresher to clean up. She still had his blood under her fingernails, to go along with his come in her body. She cleaned her sticky thighs, and washed her hands, and looked at herself in the mirror.

_Spacer trash. He’s not yours._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shara meant to leave when her contract was up, and she figured maybe she'd keep Kes's comm address, but she wasn't going to keep him around or anything.

 

Kes knew something was up. The comm Shara sent was weirdly cryptic, not the usual kind of thing at all.

He’d been bracing for this since the start. He knew she was only here until her contract was up. Same as him, but her contract was due to end before his, he thought. He wasn’t sure; she’d never told him. She’d always asked him for more information than she herself had volunteered, and he’d always told her; she knew everything about him, and he knew almost nothing about her. He was under absolutely no misapprehensions of where the power lay in this relationship, and what he was to her. He was a good time, and that was it. She was older, she was better-connected, she was more highly skilled, she had a prestigious job and made ten times as much money as he did. She was beautiful and sought-after, and the fact that she chose to spend time with him was an honor.

And he’d known that going in, he’d reminded himself of it every time he thought about her. There was no daydreaming of a future with her. She wasn’t going to settle down with anyone, not when she had such a promising career ahead of her. All the orgasms, all the pretending to be territorial, the fingernail marks in his back, they weren’t for real. She was only playing with him and he knew that, and he fell for it anyway.

She _certainly_ wasn’t going to settle down with _him_. He was a country boy, an unskilled laborer, nothing special at all. She wasn’t even interested in being with him in public. They’d gone out a few times, but she’d never introduced him to any friends or anything, besides the humiliating session with the Abednedo. Really the only purpose she had for him was in bed. And it was an honor even to do that.

He would die for her, of course. He had told himself to stay clear-headed and instead had instantly fallen hopelessly in love with her.

She was going to dump him, and he was going to be a fucking mess, and all the bracing for it in the world wasn’t really going to cut it. Norasol was right, as always, and he’d known that.

But maybe it was good for him. If he could just build up some scar tissue, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much the next time.

It was going to hurt, though, it was _really_ going to hurt.

And he knew, as soon as she opened the door and was looking at him like that, he knew that it was now. This was when it ended, this was when she broke his heart.

He’d wondered what it would look like if she looked at him with something other than lust, and this was it. She’d brought him here for a goodbye fuck, and at the end she was going to wish him well and not leave him with her forwarding address. He knew it instantly.

“Kes,” she said, and kissed him hello, and he let her hold his face between her hands, and tried to shore himself up so he wouldn’t be a fucking mess right in front of her. He’d practiced this, in his head. He’d practiced. Because if he could at least be graceful until he left the room, that would be some small victory. At least let him have a pretense of dignity, a foundation to build on to eventually get over this.

He couldn’t not return the kiss, and it hurt, it hurt real bad, but it was hot too. She finally let go of his face and said, “Baby, we gotta talk.”

He nodded tightly, and followed her in, and she sat on the bed and he sat on the chair and held his hands in his lap and tried to make himself look up at her. He had a lot of experience at making himself look at people he didn’t want to look at, but it was harder because she was so good to look at.

She was watching him, when he finally got himself together enough to look up. “I don’t know how to talk about this,” she said, and laughed nervously, and he supposed that was-- he should be grateful for that. At least she felt enough for him that this was tricky for her too.

_Keep your dignity, Kes_ , he thought, biting his lip and trying to focus. _Maybe at least she can remember you fondly. That’s something_.

No, no, it really wasn’t anything. “I don’t either,” he said.

Her expression softened a little. “Well,” she said, smiling a little, “I mean, I haven’t told you yet, so it only makes sense that you don’t.” It seemed like she was maybe poking fun at him, and that was-- okay that was pretty bad, and he could feel that his face was getting hot.

“Let’s not pretend I didn’t know this was coming,” he said, trying really really hard not to sound bitter. He wound up smiling, his mouth too tight for the expression.

She looked surprised. “What?”

“Oh come on,” he said, and he couldn’t keep his teeth closed over the bitterness. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am. I know how these things work.”

Her surprise shaded toward shock, which was really unwarranted; had she been assuming he was some kind of complete simpleton? “You do, do you?”

He stared at her. “I’ve been kind of expecting this,” he said.

She really looked shocked now. “If you knew it was going to happen, why didn’t you speak up earlier?” Now _she_ sounded bitter, like this was something happening to her, not something she was doing to him of her own free will. “If you know so much.”

Was this somehow his fault? That was really unfair. “Don’t blame me for this,” he said. “I only did what I thought you wanted.”

Now she looked like maybe he’d slapped her mother. “You think I wanted this to happen,” she said, incredulous.

The whole conversation was deeply surreal, like maybe it was happening to someone else, and Kes thought maybe he was just pulling his own mind out of the present so he wouldn’t have to feel it. It wasn’t working, not really; all it meant was that he didn’t understand what was going on.

“I figured it was pretty clear,” he said, feeling a little sick. Maybe it was his fault, somehow. Maybe he was assuming she had more power than she did. But even as he thought it, he got angrier; he hadn’t instigated _any_ of this, he hadn’t _ever_ been offered a say in anything that had happened. The only choice he could have made was not to respond to her initial overtures. He’d never had any power or leverage in this relationship. Why was she trying to make him feel ashamed?

“If you know so much about it,” she said, inexplicably so upset that her voice shook, “then why don’t you tell me what we should do now?”

“How should I know?” he asked. “It’s up to you! It’s all up to you! I don’t have any say in any of this. You do whatever you want. Don’t try to make this into _my_ responsibility, somehow.”

She jerked back like he’d slapped her. “Oh,” she said, perfectly blank. She took a breath in, then let it out slowly. “Well,” she said at last, “I guess that answers my question. You should probably go.”

 

He didn’t really remember walking back to the dormitory, didn’t remember whether he saw anyone along the way. He wasn’t aware of anything until someone interrupted his walking rhythm, and he had to pause and step backwards and with great difficulty focus his eyes on Norasol.

He was in the entry foyer to the dorm building. She was sitting down here because the light was better so she could do her mending; she often did, and took on mending for other people because she was quite good at it. He helped her, sometimes. She was standing in front of him now, though, and he wasn’t sure how it had happened.

“Kes,” she said. “Look at me, Kes.”

He took a breath and blinked and okay, he was in himself again. “Auntie,” he said.

“Dear Mother,” she said, and hugged him, “you scared me, it was like you couldn’t even see me. What has happened?”

Kes rested his head against the side of Norasol’s, and took a couple of breaths, and said, “Exactly what you predicted would happen.”

“You gotta be more specific,” Norasol said, “I’m right about a lot of things.”

“Shara,” he said. “Her contract’s up and she’s leaving so she’s done with me.”

“Oh _Kes_ ,” Norasol said, and squeezed him tighter, but then she let him go and pulled back to look at his face. “What? No it’s not.”

He blinked at her. “Yes it is,” he said.

“Kes, her contract isn’t up until the week before ours is,” Norasol said.

He considered that a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Well. Then. I guess. I don’t know.” Oh _wow_ that hurt. Oh. He swallowed it down, took a breath, and said, “Well, she’s done with me anyway.”

“Tell me exactly,” Norasol said, concerned. “Tell me exactly what she said.”

“Don’t make me do that,” he said. “Norasol. Don’t-- I don’t need to make this worse than it already is. I knew it was going to happen, and I have to deal with it now that it has.”

“I’m not doing this to torture you, you idiot baby,” Norasol said crossly. “I need to know what you actually fought about.”

“We didn’t fight,” Kes said. “She called me over to break up with me and she broke up with me. There’s not really anything to dissect, there.”

“But why would you break up?” Norasol asked, mystified. “She’s not leaving!”

“I don’t know,” he said, and it felt like tearing something out of himself. “I don’t know, okay? It’s not up to me, it was never up to me. None of this was up to me.”

She stared at him, frowning deeply. “Something’s very fishy,” she said. “Kes, this is important, I need you to get your head out of your ass for a moment.”

Kes stared at her incredulously. “What?”

Norasol shook her head slightly. “Something is wrong,” she said. “I need you to clear your mind for a moment and listen to me.”

Kes summoned every bit of patience he had. “I think,” he said, “you need to leave me alone for just a little while. I’m not really going to be able to clear my mind for you until I’ve had a moment to feel what I feel, here.”

“Did she lie and tell you her contract was up,” Norasol asked, “or— I just need to know that, Kes.”

“Why does it matter?” he asked. His hands were shaking now, he noticed dimly.

“Because it doesn’t make _sense_ ,” Norasol said.

“When did any of this make any sense?” he asked. “You were right and I was wrong and that’s just-- how it is.”

Norasol threw up her hands. “I am always right,” she said, “and I was definitely right that you were going to be an idiot about this. But something is wrong here and Shara might be in danger.”

“In danger,” Kes said blankly. He was just about out of cope. “For dumping me.”

“Kes,” Norasol said. “She was going to leave you when her contract was up. Her contract’s not up. This is a strange thing for her to do, unless you offered her some hideous offense?” Norasol jabbed her finger accusingly into his breastbone.

“I didn’t say anything,” Kes said, offended. “And how do you know when her contract was up?”

“I asked her,” Norasol said. “I said, you’re going to break my baby’s heart, can you at least tell me when, and she told me, and it’s not for three more months, so something very strange has happened.” She pulled her hand away from Kes’s chest. “Take my mending basket and go to bed, you’re useless. I’m going to find out what’s wrong.”

“No,” Kes said. “Auntie. No.”

“You don’t get to deny me this time,” Norasol said grimly, and Kes found himself standing in his dormitory room with the mending basket in his hands and no very clear idea of how he’d gotten there.

 

 

Shara had to sit down while she waited for the checklist to complete, she was just too exhausted to stand. Everything was so fucking difficult lately. She sat against the side of the dock, knees pulled up, and dozed.

The mechanic crouched next to her, and she woke up. “Lady,” he said, “are you okay?”

“I’m so tired,” she said. She held her hand out for the datapad. He hadn’t flagged anything. Another bonus for fuel conservation. Good. She’d need the money. If she went through with this. Stars, she had to make a decision.

“Are you sick?” the mechanic asked, pulling back slightly.

She shook her head. “It’s not catching,” she said. She’d spent the entire layover asleep on the bench next to the ship in the hangar. She had an almost infinite capacity for sleep. It was so stupid. Maybe her father had answered her comm. That would be good to come back to.

It wasn’t like she had anything else good to come back to, here. But she had to stick this contract out. One way or the other.

“Well,” the mechanic said. “Get some rest, lady.” He patted her shoulder and walked away, and was replaced by someone else, who sat down next to her.

Norasol. “There you are,” the woman said.

Shara wanted to cry. “Please,” she said, “I’m so tired.”

“I thought the mob stole you,” Norasol said.

“What.” Shara blinked at her.

“I thought you were trying to give Kes a coded message and he is so stupid he did not understand you,” Norasol said.

“I don’t want to talk about him,” Shara said bitterly, rubbing her face.

“He told me that your contract was finished and you are leaving,” Norasol said.

Shara blinked at her again. She’d told him when her contract ended, hadn’t she? She’d told somebody. She’d told Norasol, anyway. “Why would he say that?” she asked.

“He said that was what you told him,” Norasol said.

“No,” she said, frowning. “I wouldn’t tell him that because it’s not true. Despite what he apparently thinks of me, I’m not actually a liar.”

“That was what I thought,” Norasol said. “So, for the record, whatever you actually told him, that is what he heard.”

“That is not what I told him,” Shara said.

Norasol nodded solemnly. “Well,” she said. “I am not trying to meddle, but the only thing I could think was that you told him that as a coded message, and he is so goddamn naive he didn’t understand you.”

“No,” Shara said. “I wasn’t trying to give him a coded message.” She frowned. “Then why did he accuse me of having planned this whole thing from the start?”

Norasol tilted her head. “I think,” she said, “whatever you actually told him, he did not understand you, and proceeded as if you had told him the thing that he has been bracing himself to hear since the first moment he saw you.”

“What would that be?” Shara asked, mystified.

“Well,” Norasol said. “He has been bracing himself to be ready for when you dump him since the first time you spoke to him. I expect that as soon as you said you had to tell him something, he assumed that’s what it was and proceeded accordingly.”

“Why would—” Shara cut herself off. It was a fair point; she’d made it pretty clear she had her own plans. But that meant she had to reconsider the conversation in a new light, and she’d been working pretty hard not to think about it.

“Did you actually tell him anything specific, or did you say something along the lines of, _we need to talk_ , and he interrupted you, like in a holonovela, and said I _know what this is about_ , and you then proceeded to have a stupid disjointed conversation that in retrospect didn’t make any sense in which he said a number of shocking things that changed how you thought of him?” Norasol had done Kes’s line in a fake low voice that was hilarious, but Shara was too busy being floored by the realization to really appreciate the hilarity.

“Pretty much,” she said, and rubbed her face. “Stars, I need my papa.”

“I would very much like to meet him,” Norasol said. “But in the meantime I am going to suggest perhaps you have another conversation with my idiot nephew, and perhaps tell him what is actually going on this time, instead of letting him assume he can read your mind.”

“I thought you weren’t meddling,” Shara said.

“I wasn’t,” Norasol said. She looked tired too, Shara noticed suddenly. “I really thought they were stealing you, girl.”

“And Kes was upset,” Shara concluded, “so you figured you’d better—”

“Fuck that,” Norasol said, “that boy’s feelings are less important than a young woman getting sold into slavery. I was doing this for you.”

“You don’t know me,” Shara said, frowning.

“I don’t have to,” Norasol said. “Fuck. It’s not my business if you fuck my idiot nephew. I love him and I’d do anything for him but I’m not involving myself in his sordid romantic affairs. I don’t know that I care for you as a long-term partner for him, honestly, since he seems to be incapable of having an actual conversation with you, and there’s a great deal more that goes into the kind of partnership he wants than good sex, although he is still too stupid to really know the difference.” She waved a hand, looking grouchy. “Talk to him or not, it’s not my concern. But if someone tries to force you into a contract you don’t want, you come to _me_ , not him, because he is a twenty-year-old boy who does not yet know how to think with anything besides his dick.”

“Nobody’s forcing me into,” Shara said, and then burst into tears, because she _was_ trapped, was the thing, and she didn’t know what to do, and there was no one on this terrible bucket of spaceborne bolts who could advise her.

“Oh no,” Norasol said, but reached out immediately and caught her shoulders, pulling her in and cradling her head against her chest. “Oh, no, my sweet girl, but you are miserable anyway and I am sorry for that.” Norasol rocked with her, and Shara sobbed, since it was too late to try to cram that all back where it had come from. No dignity left to salvage, so Shara hung on and cried.

“There, there,” Norasol murmured sweetly, and produced a clean sweet-smelling handkerchief for Shara to wipe her face with. “There, there. I don’t know what’s troubling you. I hope it’s not my nephew, but I’d rather it was him than the Fronteras, because him I know I can kick his ass, and them I’m not so sure about.”

Shara collected herself enough to sit back on her heels and wipe her face. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “But I’m so _tired_.”

“You have a lot on your shoulders,” Norasol said, “and it is hard to be separated from family.”

“Papa and I always try to get postings together,” Shara admitted, “but this gig was only for one pilot and it was so much more money, so I took it.” She blew her nose. “I’m not a child. I’ve been alone on gigs before. This isn’t my first time doing this.”

“Of course not,” Norasol said. “But you know. I didn’t come here with Kes to protect him. He’s as much here to take care of me as the other way around. Numbers, is what’s important. And it’s harder for a woman now. These Imperials have been a bad influence.”

“They have,” Shara said, and her breath hitched.

“If you want to go somewhere more private to continue this,” Norasol said, “I would like to take care of you for a little longer.”

“Okay,” Shara said, and Norasol helped her up, and held her arm as they walked, as if Shara were an invalid. But it meant no one bothered her or tried to talk to her.

They went back to Shara’s room. There was no comm from Shara’s father, and she tried not to cry about it. She had only sent her text-comm two days ago, before her last trip, and if he was on a longer jaunt he wouldn’t get it in hyperspace, they didn’t have those kinds of comms.

Norasol made her tea, and cobbled together dinner from the food she kept in her room, and sat on the chair where Kes had last sat. Shara sat on her bed, with the sheets that still smelled like him, and looked over at the woman who looked so much like him, and tried to think through the heavy fog in her mind. “I don’t understand how he could have said what he said regardless of whether he understood me or not,” she said finally.

“You would have to ask him,” Norasol said. She looked at her chrono. She had a clunky old-fashioned one that she kept fastened to the strap of her overalls. “He is working just now, there is a T-4420 in from Manaan and I am sure he will be out late and absolutely filthy.”

Shara thought about the way Kes went still and quiet when he was tired, how his hands stayed by his side and his mouth stayed closed but he did not complain. “How is he?” she asked, hating herself for wanting to know. He was a dick; he’d straight-out told her that her problems caused by him were her problems alone. Fuck him.

But she wanted to know anyway.

Norasol shrugged. “I’ll tell you if you want to make it your concern,” she said. “As far as concerns me, he is working as much overtime as they will give him, which is a lot because Etto got called away to handle cargo on a run to the Outer Rim, and took his brother with him, so we’re short-handed. I think Kes worked forty of the last forty-eight hours, counting now.” Norasol looked up from her teacup, where she was intently looking at something. “I wouldn’t mind it except I don’t know that he has any sense and I think he’s going to get hurt.”

It didn’t concern her. It wasn’t Shara’s business.

“I worked forty hours of the last forty-eight too,” she pointed out. But she knew it was different. Most of piloting was just keeping the thing pointed in the right direction. Much of what he did involved extremely heavy things moving faster than they ought to be and dropping other very heavy things with a low degree of accuracy. Loadmasters died or were injured and maimed all the time.

Norasol swirled her cup and peered into it. “Mm,” she said. “Well, I’ve done what I can to keep him safe. I’ll do what I can to keep you safe. Nobody seems to actively intend either of you harm at the moment, my tea leaves are telling me.”

“Can you tell,” Shara began, and bit it off. Norasol wasn’t on her side. She couldn’t be.

“What is it, child?” the older woman asked.

Kes and Norasol were family. They were part of something. They had a whole, and belonged to it, and it was complete, and Shara was spacer trash looking in from the outside and wishing for something she didn’t understand. There was no room for her there.

“Nothing,” she said.

 

* * *

 

Kes yelled a curse and snatched his hand back out of the way of the loading droid’s articulated joint. He shook his hand, stuck his thumb into his mouth, and sucked futilely on it for a moment. Blood. He spat it out and looked. Yeah, it had caught him good. He swore again.

“Bad?” Etto asked tersely, pausing to look.

Kes made himself bend the joint, gritting his teeth. “No,” he said. The bone wasn’t affected, the tendons weren’t affected. Just the flesh. He looked at it again. He’d lose that nail in a couple days, probably. Fuck. Just what he needed. Dominant hand, too. He stuck it back into his mouth to keep it from getting blood everywhere. “Medkit?”

“Are you sure it isn’t bad?” Etto asked. “Norasol will kill me.”

“Where is the fucking medkit,” Kes said around the obstacle of his thumb, swallowing blood.

“By the starboard door,” Etto said. “Give me the datapad.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Kes said. Etto trailed after him, and retrieved the medkit from its box in the pillar.

“Let me fix that,” Etto said.

“I can do it,” Kes said. “Xacristo, I’m fine.”

“You’ll get blood everywhere,” Etto said. “Ah shit, it’s bad!”

“You sound like a little clucking chanticlo,” Kes said, taking one of the squares of gauze and wrapping his thumb in it. “It is fine. You’d think it was _your_ thumb.” Blood soaked the gauze instantly, and he got another square and wrapped it tighter, then hunted for an unopened bacta patch.

“Let me,” Etto said. “Hold pressure, you jerk.”

Kes rolled his eyes and pinched the gauze between thumb and forefinger of his other hand. “It’s not bleeding that badly,” he said.

“Says you,” Etto said. “You planetsiders are so blasé about this shit. It’s only my arm! Like you’ve got so many extra limbs to spare or something.”

“I don’t even think that’s really a thing,” Kes said. “Stop panicking, Etto, you can get by without me for five minutes while I stop this from bleeding. Didn’t you just have a week off?”

“I was working cargo escort,” Etto groused, “that’s not a vacation,” but he found a bacta patch.

“Wrap it tight,” Kes said. “Real tight. Come on.”

“Don’t yell at me,” Etto said.

“I’m not yelling at you,” Kes said. Etto wrapped the bacta patch clumsily but effectively, and Kes inspected his handiwork. “Okay,” he said, and then wrapped a bunch of medical tape over the top of it to keep it from bleeding through or getting dirty. “Fine.”

“Sit down and hold that over your head until it stops bleeding,” Etto fussed, shoving him out the door and making him sit on the edge of the walkway. He yanked Kes’s arm and held it up over his head. “And give me the damn datapad already.”

“Fine,” Kes said, retrieving it from under his other arm and handing it over.

Etto didn’t take it. He was looking past Kes at someone on the walkway. Kes looked up.

It was Shara.

Of course it was Shara. He was filthy and looked like a disaster, he’d been here for over twelve hours straight, and had blood all over him. What was she doing here?

“I need to get your signature on this,” she said to Kes.

“You know what,” Etto said, “he was just going on break. We’re just about done with this load anyway, Kes, I’ll see you tomorrow.” And he took the datapad and beat a hasty retreat. He knew about the breakup; Kes had told him despondently and then had refused to accept any sexual consolation, to Etto’s great disappointment.

Kes watched him go. Good, he supposed, but he could have used some backup. He looked back over at Shara, decided he couldn’t do this sitting here, and climbed back up to his feet. “You need me to what?”

“Are you injured?” she asked, frowning at him.

“I have a tiny cut on my thumb,” he informed her, with as much dignity as he could muster, “and Etto is out of his mind.” He leaned on the wall, though, because the nice numbness of shock had worn off and the injury had started to throb angrily.

“Oh,” she said. She was impossible to read. She looked-- well, he bitterly wanted to think she looked terrible, but really she didn’t. Her hair was impeccable, she had lipstick or lip gloss or something on that made her mouth shiny, she was dressed neatly in impeccable civvies. “Well.” She held out a datapad. “I need you to sign this.”

He took it carefully in his uninjured hand, and frowned at it. “What is it?” he asked, staring in confusion at the wall of text. It was in Basic, and swam around in front of his eyes. Cargo manifests were one thing, they were usually lists with the same word a bunch of times. Chunks of text like this were quite another.

He read reasonably well in Iberican, but Basic wasn’t spelled like it sounded at all, and he was a slow reader, and tended to mix up letters a lot. He went to a lot of trouble in his daily life to avoid reading big chunks of text in Basic where anybody was there to see him do it. If he had time it was okay. Especially if he had time and a datapad with a dictionary. He almost always managed to get contracts sent to him ahead of time, or let one of the others do the reading for him. He also had generally memorized what most of the words he needed to look out for were shaped like, so he could pick them out of a smaller chunk without a problem.

But a big chunk like this, he had no chance.

“It’s a pretty standard agreement,” she said.

“Agreement to what?” He frowned up at her. He’d never had any business dealings with her. He’d never even bought her any presents, or accepted any, beyond small gifts of food.

“You already gave me a verbal consent,” she said. “It’s just formalizing that in writing.”

“A verbal consent,” he said, looking back down at the pad. A-B-R-O-G-A-T-I-O-N-A-N-D-W-A-I-V-E-R, he read painstakingly. He didn’t know what that first word was. Abrogation. Arob— It was clearly important, since it was the first word. He didn’t know what it was. She already thought he was stupid.

“When you said _don’t make this my responsibility_ ,” she said.

Had he said that? He’d said that phrase, but-- He tried again to read it. Abor-gation and waiver, he knew a waiver was uh— it was a thing, anyway. Of par-net-alri— He tried again. Pa-ter-na-lri-- Was he reading that right? He frowned. It was taking every ounce of his concentration not to move his lips as he tried to read. He bit them instead. It- he- unerd-sign-ed, her- eby. R-e-n-o-u-n-- He was getting light-headed trying to read this. He was panicking. He realized he was holding his breath.

“Fuck,” he said, and sat down again. He’d bled through the bacta patch. Fuck. He put his hand up over his head to slow the bleeding and tried again. He couldn’t look at her. Re- noun- ceall right, he knew that phrase, _all right_ , and c-l-a-i-m to--

“Kes,” Shara said. “It’s bleeding all down your arm.”

“I know,” he said tersely, embarrassed. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just skin.”

She sighed and sat down next to him, and took his arm. “Don’t,” he said, but she already had his hand between hers and had stuck a handkerchief over the injury and was holding pressure with strong, competent fingers.

“Your skin is supposed to hold the blood in,” she said, and she looked tired and impatient and resigned.

“Mostly it does,” he said. He was still a little light-headed. It wasn’t the bleeding, he was panicking. He needed to pull himself together. He breathed in, held it, breathed out slowly, and went back to trying to read, skimming down the page to figure out where the important clauses were.

She was watching him. He bit his lips again to keep from sounding out that word. A-b-r-o-gation. Abro. gation. He didn’t know what that was. He’d never heard that word. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

“I don’t understand,” he made himself say.

“What don’t you understand?” she asked. “It’s just for administrative stuff. I don’t want someone coming in to claim custody in five or ten years or whatever. I don’t have time for that. My mom’s sister tried it and it was the worst thing I ever went through.”

The letters all swam together and Kes blinked. “Custody,” he said. Of what. Under-sig-ned. Her-eby. Renou-nce. All right, and cla-imt-o. Offs-pr-gnre. Gibberish. It was gibberish.

“I’m not saying you would,” Shara said, and she was very clearly making herself be patient. “But someone could on your behalf, if I didn’t have documentation.”

“I don’t understand,” he said again, and he was really afraid now, because he hadn’t entered into any agreements with her and he didn’t know what he was giving her and he couldn’t read this.

“What’s not to understand?” she asked, and she was pressing down really hard on his thumb. “Just sign it, you already told me you didn’t want anything to do with this.”

His hand was shaking and he had to put the datapad down in his lap. “I’m not stupid,” he said thinly. “I’m not going to sign something if I haven’t read it.” He gritted his teeth. Offs-pr-ngre-sult-gni-fr-om _from_ \- he knew that word, lias-on with, _with_ , he knew that, he had no idea what this document was about. He couldn’t make out enough of the words. He couldn’t tell where one word ended and the other began.

He couldn’t breathe. Come on. In, hold it, out slowly. Skip to the next paragraph. It was no good. It was all chunks of letters. Fuck, he had a dictionary on the datapad he’d just surrendered to Etto. Sometimes copying the words over to look them up helped him figure out where they ended and began and he could recognize them better.

“We already have a verbal agreement,” Shara said. There was a pause. “Kes? You’ve gone white. How much blood have you lost?”

“I’m fine,” he said, desperate. “I just-- I don’t know what agreement you’re talking about and I can’t read this.”

She was looking at him now. He could feel it. His face went hot. He stared unseeing at the datapad. “You can read,” she said.

“I don’t know what ab-or-gation means,” he said, sounding it out. “I don’t know what pater-naleri means. I don’t know what un-erd-sig means. I don’t know what offs-prin-reg means.” He couldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes. “If I have to read stuff in Basic I make them give it to me ahead of time so I can use the dictionary and look it up.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he said thinly, keeping his eyes closed so he didn’t have to see whatever face she was making. “Please don’t laugh at me. We didn’t have a school. We moved around too much. I’m good at math. I’m okay at reading in Iberican. But in Basic I can’t tell where the words end. The letters move around. I don’t know what this says and I don’t understand what you think we agreed to.”

His hand was shaking in her grasp, he was shaking all over, and he knew she could feel it. So much for any scrap of dignity. “I’m not laughing at you,” she said quietly.

“How bad is it,” Norasol’s voice said, and Kes’s eyes snapped open to see her coming out the door. She clicked her tongue. “Child! I _told_ you you were going to hurt yourself.”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Kes said. He was agonizingly stuck between mortifying embarrassment and not wanting Norasol to witness it, and a cold shock of relief because if nothing else Norasol was _home_ and a kind of merciless, implacable safety. If nothing else, she’d keep him from signing any dubious contracts he didn’t understand. Their people had been screwed by that particular horror enough, it was all intertwined with their mythology.

Norasol sat down next to Shara like there was nothing odd about finding her here. “Did you seriously just stick a bacta patch on this?” she demanded, taking his hand from Shara and unwrapping the handkerchief. She clicked her tongue again, and peeled the patch off. “After it soaked through two squares of gauze, and you thought that would hold it?”

“Auntie,” Kes said. She was going to pretend that everything was fine, which was fine, except that it wasn’t. Maybe he would die here. Spontaneously. Instantly. It would be a relief.

“Why are you _shivering_ ,” Norasol said, frowning at him.

“ _Auntie_ ,” he said, with more emphasis.

Norasol looked at Shara. “It’s nice to see you, by the way, dear. Etto sent me out here because Kes was bleeding, I’m not here to interfere in whatever it was you were doing.” She pulled out the medkit she always carried in her pocket and swiped a disinfectant wipe across his thumb, then deftly applied bacta cream and a dollop of surgical adhesive, stuck a patch on it, and held it closed.

“It’s all right,” Shara said.

It took more self-possession than Kes was strictly sure he could muster to speak, but he managed it. “Would it be,” he said, and had to stop and swallow before he could continue. It would be terrible, but it would be better than the alternative. “Would it be all right if Norasol read the agreement for me.”

“Agreement,” Norasol said, eyes twinkling with interest, and then she immediately remembered herself and said, “I mean, only if it’s not private.” She _was_ trying. Then her eyes lit on the datapad and she saw the block of text and grimaced. “Oh Kes,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She knew all about his trouble with reading. And of course she understood how embarrassed he was. She was mean to him about many things, but never that. _Never_ that.

“It’s not private,” Shara said.

“If it was, you could read it to him, surely,” Norasol said. “I’m really not trying to be nosy.” She let up the pressure on Kes’s thumb, but the glue didn’t hold, and blood came through the patch immediately. She clicked her tongue in annoyance. “I hope it’s something nice.” She applied more surgical glue and started again. “I’d really like it to be something nice. I’ll just be another moment.”

Shara sighed, and took the datapad out of Kes’s other hand. His arm was stretched out across her body, and he could almost have touched her, and it was all he wanted, and also the worst thing in the world. “I can read it to him,” she said. “I didn’t know he-- had trouble.” She glanced over at him. “It’s called dyslexia, and it’s really common, and there are methods to work around it, my best friend when I was a kid had it.”

“None of us knew what to do,” Norasol said. “He’s not stupid, he’s clearly not actually stupid, despite all the things I normally say about him, but he just can’t focus very well. It gave me fits trying to teach him. He worked _so hard_ and he still just couldn’t quite get it.”

Shara nodded wearily. “It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’ll spell it for you, you can look it up. I don’t know what it’s called in Iberican. There’s a bunch of stuff you can do for it. It doesn’t make it go away, but it usually means you can get by a lot better.”

“I’ll be done in a moment,” Norasol said, “if you want to wait until I’m gone to read that.”

“No,” Shara said, “it’s fine.” She tilted the datapad. “Abrogation and waiver of paternal rights. I the undersigned hereby renounce all right and claim to offspring resulting from the liason with the petitioner, Shara Bey, henceforth and in perpetuity.” She waggled the datapad. “Then there’s a bunch of disclaimers and specifics, and then there’s the space for your signature. Like I said, it’s not that I’m expecting you to be a jerk but someone could, in your name, and that’s what happened to me and my papa and it was really annoying.”

Kes blinked, and glanced over at Norasol, baffled. Her eyes had gone wide and she was staring at him in disbelief. “What?” he said, squinting at Shara. That couldn’t _possibly_ mean what it had sounded like.

“Holy shit,” Norasol said. “That was absolutely not what I thought this was going to be about.”

“You already said yes to this,” Shara said, clearly about at the end of her rope. “You told me not to make it your problem.”

“To _what_ ,” Kes said. “I still don’t know what an abrogation is. I mean I know what all the other words mean but I don’t know what they mean in that order. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Holy _shit_ ,” Norasol said again.

“Sweet fucking _Force_ ,” Shara said, “I am going to punch you in the face because you are being an _asshole_. We fucking _talked_ about this and you were _such a dick_.”

“Offspring,” Kes said, completely mystified, “is how you talk about _livestock_ , what the fuck is this agreement about?”

“She’s _pregnant_ ,” Norasol said. “She’s, I’m going to pass out.”

“Don’t pass out,” Kes said automatically (the running joke was less funny every time), and then what she’d said hit him, and he looked at Shara, and said, “We absolutely did _not_ fucking discuss this.”

Shara threw up her hands, leaving the datapad sitting in her lap; she had to lean back to avoid hitting him in the arm to do this. Norasol was still hanging onto Kes’s hand. “What the fuck did you think we were talking about?” she exclaimed.

“I told you,” Norasol said, “I told you, whatever you said to him, all he heard was that you were leaving him, it’s only what he’s been repeating to himself for months now.”

They both looked at her and she said, “ _Fuck_ not meddling, I’m not letting him fuck _this_ up!”

“I don’t know what the fuck you think you told me,” Kes said, “but there was no mention of anything to do with offspring or any other word that means anything like that, and we were even speaking Iberican so it’s not like it would’ve been a word I don’t know.”

“Mother of _mercy_ ,” Shara said, gritting her teeth so hard they squeaked. “Fine! I’m pregnant, and I don’t care what a terrible idea it is, I want to keep it, so I want you to sign this fucking thing!” She shoved the datapad at him so hard Norasol lost her grip on his hand, and he yanked his arm back out of her custody and held the datapad in both his arms and stared at Shara.

“I sign this,” he said after a moment, “and it means the baby’s not mine.”

“Exactly,” she said.

He looked at the datapad, looked at the line that was waiting for his signature, looked up at the word he hadn’t known, _abrogation_ , looked back over at Shara. “That’s not what I want,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell you thought we were talking about but it wasn’t this.”

“Don’t fight me on this,” she said. “Kes! Don’t fight me. Now you’re just being contrary.”

“I don’t want to fight,” he said, holding the datapad against his chest so he didn’t have to look at that word he didn’t know. He could figure it out from the sentence. It meant giving up. He didn’t want that. “I don’t-- I didn’t know there was a baby, you said there couldn’t be one. Before, when I asked, because maybe I’m stupid but I _know_ where babies come from.”

“I made a mistake,” Shara said. “I was supposed to be on a different kind of contraceptive but I didn’t realize they hadn’t started it. It was my fault and I accept that and I just don’t want to fight about this.”

Norasol looked like she was holding her breath. Kes had no idea what to say to her. “I didn’t know,” he said, painfully aware that Shara was getting more and more angry with him, but it wasn’t fair. He knew how contraceptives worked. She’d said she was taking them. He wasn’t stupid for having never thought of a supposedly impossible thing. He took a breath, maybe sympathetically for Norasol who was turning sort of purple, and let it out slowly. “I don’t want to fight either. But I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to-- abrogate. My paternal-- rights.”

“Well I’m not just going to-- _hand it over_ to you,” Shara said.

“I’m not,” Kes said, “it’s not--” He swallowed hard. He had the datapad pressed really hard against his chest. “I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever agreement you make, I’ll sign it. Just don’t-- take it _away_ from me.”

“I just want you to sign that one,” Shara said.

“No,” Kes said. “Anything else, but not this.” Everything in his stomach had wound up into a tight ball and he didn’t know what else to say.

“Please let me arbitrate,” Norasol said, “just for a moment, because otherwise I am really going to pass out.”

“Fine,” Shara snapped.

“Don’t pass out,” Kes mumbled, because it was basically a conditioned response.

“Number one,” Norasol said. “There is a baby. You are pregnant. This is a possibility, or a current fact?”

“Current fact,” Shara gritted.

“Okay,” Norasol said. “Number two! The father of this child is Kes.”

Shara looked really offended, and Norasol held up her hand. “Legal documents are always like this,” she said. “To be honest though I don’t think he would care? I am just asking for the sake of clarity.”

“Yes,” Shara gritted, even more tightly.

Kes had already discarded that as a consideration, but he supposed it was good to know. Norasol was right, though, he really didn’t care.

“Number three. You have broken up with Kes for-- what was the reason, now?” Norasol asked. “I wasn’t there, I just want it on the record, that’s all, I am not judging.”

“Because he,” Shara said, and faltered. “Uh. Because he was an asshole when I told him I was pregnant.”

“Mm,” Norasol said. “There is where I lost you, because he didn’t know, just now, that you were pregnant, and he’s an absolutely pathetic liar so there is _no way_ he was pretending about that, so whatever horrible thing he said, he said about something else, and I don’t know what else he was talking about. Do you?”

The whole horrible conversation with Shara had been as if it had happened to someone else, and the memory was foggy, so Kes wasn’t really sure what he had said. But he made an attempt. “I think,” he said, “I found it objectionable that you seemed to want to make me be in charge of us breaking up when I didn’t want to in the first place. It didn’t seem very fair to me.”

“Mm,” Norasol said.

“Oh,” Shara said.

“If at any point you’d uttered the word _pregnant_ ,” Kes said, “or _baby_ , or _father_ , or _offspring_ , or maybe even something about contraception, or— there are a lot of keywords you could have used, in either Iberican or Basic, and I could have drawn a conclusion. But all you said was _talk_ and _I don’t know what to say_ , and I did not have very much to go on, and perhaps I leapt to a regrettable conclusion but literally everyone on this spaceport has laughed at me and predicted a slightly different method and timing for how you were going to dump me, so I was doing my best to get there with as much dignity as I could muster.”

“Why were _they_ telling you about how _I_ was going to dump you?” Shara demanded, and she seemed upset about that, which of all things to get mad about seemed like kind of a weird one.

“I can’t imagine,” Kes said dully. “Maybe because I’m a semi-literate unskilled laborer from a refugee family off a dying planet, with pretty much no money and no property and no marketable skills except my dubious coordination.” He waggled his bloody hand without letting go of the datapad or looking at her.

Shara must have looked at Norasol, because Norasol said, “Well, he’s not wrong,” grudgingly.

“You’re the Lost Kings of whatever,” Shara said, and Kes laughed humorlessly before he could stop himself.

“Literally everyone makes fun of us for that,” he said.

“Also,” Norasol said quietly, “not really wrong.” She sniffed. “Except the ones who are scared of us.”

“ _Especially_ them,” Kes pointed out. “They make fun of us more than _anybody_.”

“I’m spacer trash,” Shara said. “My own mother didn’t want me, so my dad raised me, so badly that my aunt tried to take me away from him, and that’s the only time in my life anybody ever wanted me, to prove a point. I’ve never lived on a planet long enough to see a whole season and I don’t know anything about families but I’m not letting go of this fucking baby, it’s the only thing I’ll ever have that’s _mine_.”

“Xacristo,” Norasol said, throwing up her hands. “Family is the only thing we have. Most of us aren’t real blood relatives. You think we’d care who your mother was? You think we wouldn’t want your baby? We’d take you anyway, we’d take your father too, we just want people to hold onto.”

“All I’ve ever wanted is a baby,” Kes said. “I don’t care if you can’t stand me, I don’t care if I have to give you all the money I ever make, I don’t care what kind of agreement you make me sign, I just want to be able to see that baby sometimes and say it’s mine. I don’t care if I only get to see her once every ten years. I just want to be able to say I have a child who knows my name.”

“Kes,” Norasol said. “But what about its mother?”

“I love her,” Kes said, face hot, staring at his feet, “and I would do anything for her including stay away from her if that’s what she wants. But I’m not signing this thing. I’m not— abrogating my paternal rights.”

“Back to number three, though,” Norasol said. “What-- why does this child’s mother want you to stay away from her, now?”

Kes dragged his eyes up from his feet and over to Shara, who had her mouth squashed firmly shut in an expression like she was mad about something, but her eyebrows didn’t seem to agree. “No reason,” Shara said finally, exhaling.

“No reason,” Kes answered faintly.

“No reason,” she repeated.

“I am going to go in and tell Etto you’re done for the day,” Norasol said, climbing to her feet, “and I will cover the rest of your shift. I expect the two of you will go and discuss this and apprise me if any further action is required on my part. In the meantime, Shara, your contract ends the week before ours does and we should speak with your father about what kind of future arrangements could be made, pending the outcome of the negotiations the two of you are about to conduct.”

 

_____________________

 

 

Shara pushed the door shut and leaned against it. Kes walked a few paces into the hallway, then turned back and looked at her.

He was so goddamned pretty. Shara wasn’t sure whether it was the hormones or what but she couldn’t stop looking at him. He stared at her with those dark, dark, tragic eyes, and shifted his weight back toward her, gazing imploringly at her.

Stars, she was in trouble; she’d never be able to say no to him about literally anything. He came back toward her, and she watched helplessly as he dropped to his knees, staring up at her. “Shara,” he said, looking absolutely goddamned wrecked, pale under the lovely soft gold of his skin, his arm all bloody, and she couldn’t stand it, remembering the way he’d blanched with terror when she’d tried to make him sign a document he couldn’t read.

“Baby,” she said, and took his face between her hands, “don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, pressing his cheek against her belly, “I’m so— I’m _so_ sorry.”

She put her hands in his hair instead, one cupping the back of his head to hold him, the other free to run through and feel how soft his hair was. “Kes,” she said. “Kes, it’s all right. I’m sorry too. I should have been more reasonable about it, I just— it’s really hard to think.”

“No,” he said, fervent, pressing his face against her, “it’s my fault, and I should have— it’s my fault.”

“I’m tired of talking about that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. What do we do?”

“Whatever you want to do,” he said. “I meant it, Shara— anything. Anything! Just don’t shut me out. _Anything_.”

“Anything,” she said.

“Anything,” he repeated. “Whatever is right for you.”

“What do you _want_ , though?” she asked.

“I want to be a father,” he said. “Apart from that it is your decision.”

“You’re not helpful,” she informed him, and let go of his head, taking his chin instead to make him look up at her. But she was gentle about it, tugging a little, and he got to his feet, and she turned him around and pushed him into the room proper.

She steered him until he sat down on her bed, and she sat next to him and reached over and took his hand between both of hers. It felt so good to touch him, to feel the warmth of his body— his faint scent, familiar in ways she hadn’t realized, was comforting too. She put her forehead against his shoulder.

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “If you could have anything, what would you want?”

“You,” he said, without hesitation. She laughed softly, eyes closed, forehead still pressed against the firm solid bulk of his shoulder.

“More specific,” she said. “Here, I’ll go first. If I could have anything at all— let’s just imagine.” She sighed, inhaling his scent, and exhaled slowly, humming. His hand was big and warm between hers, and he had curled his fingers loosely, and was gently working on interlacing them with hers to hang on better. “Mmm— Anything at all, I’d want a restoration of the Republic, a guaranteed annual income regardless of what I did, and a really nice little craft of my very own that was real fast and easy to keep up. Now you: What would you want if you could have anything?”

“You,” he said again.

“You’re not on my level, here,” she said, lifting her head to regard him with a fondness she really couldn’t help. “Come on. A farm of your own, enough money not to have to leave it? Imperial recognition for your people?”

“I can’t dream that big,” he said.

“How about little,” she said. “If you could have anything in the universe for dinner, what would it be?”

He stared at her blankly, and she thought that perhaps this was not the strategy she ought to have chosen. “I’ll go first,” she offered a little lamely. “I would have a big tray of those little rolls they make on Essen Prime, the ones with seaweed and fish, and all the trimmings that go with them, the marinated vegetable salad and the tiny bowls of different soups.”

“I’ve never had that,” Kes said, but it had worked a little; he was interested, engaged a little in the conversation, even if a little bewildered, instead of just overwhelmed and beaten-down.

“Go ahead,” she said. “What would you have for dinner, if you could have anything in the galaxy?”

He looked down at his hand between hers, and bit his lip. “I would go home,” he said. “For parties there we make _wah_ , I’m not sure what it’s called in Iberican.It’s ground maize and meat and you wrap it up in the leaves of the maize— the husks— and you make a big tray of them and steam it, and everyone eats them for days. And side dishes too, and sauces. And everyone’s together.” He looked so desperately wistful that she didn’t have the heart to tell him to dream bigger.

She leaned in and pushed her shoulder against his. “That’s a game my papa and I play,” she said. “Especially when we’re very tired, or on a very long trip and we’re worried and broke. We play that game. If you could have anything, what would you have? If you could eat anything, what would you eat? If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”

He was still looking down at their hands. “Is it a good life?” he asked.

“What?”

He looked up toward her face, made the briefest eye contact, and then looked down again shyly. “You and your papa,” he said. “It seems like you don’t really— live anywhere in particular, you just travel around. Is that good? I never lived like that, I don’t know if it would be good.”

She shrugged. “As long as we’re together it’s not bad,” she said. “Sometimes I’m sad to leave a good place, but usually it’s nice to keep moving and see new things.”

He nodded. “We must seem— strange to you, then,” he said. “With our— obsession about finding a permanent place to stay.”

“Not strange,” she said. “I used to dream about that when I was a kid. A home to always come back to. Somewhere to belong.”

“But you grew out of it,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I just started dreaming about other things instead.”

He nodded, even though that had been her perfect set-up for him to start talking about his dreams, and she thought to herself that maybe she just wasn’t going to get him to ever admit what he wanted. He was a goddamned delicate flower, was what he was.

“So c’mon,” she said. “Should I guess what you want?”

His shoulders hunched a little. Whoops, that had definitely been the wrong thing to say. “I don’t have any imagination,” he said. “All I have has been taken up in working on the same thing the rest of my family wants. I don’t know how to be— clever and think of things.”

He was upset again, and it wasn’t hard to link his breath coming a little faster and his shoulders hunching to the way he’d done the same thing when she’d accidentally cornered him into admitting his dyslexia in the most upsetting way possible.

The thing about Shara was that she was all sharp edges, and she was used to people who knew how to get out of the way of them or fend them off. She wasn’t used to people who just bared their throats to it and let it take them.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been adept enough at fending her off, before. She wouldn’t have slept with him in the first place if she’d really thought she’d just eat him alive. But somehow she’d gotten inside his shields, and now she didn’t know how to stop hurting him.

She sighed, and tipped away from him slightly so she could bend and kiss his shoulder. “Kes,” she said, “it’s okay. It’s just something you practice, or don’t, and I’ve practiced, because I didn’t have anything else.”

His shoulders came down a little, and he looked sidelong at her, cautiously. “It just,” he said softly, “it just seems to me like— like to you it’s important to be free.” His teeth worried at his lower lip. “And I don’t— I don’t want to trap you.”

Oh. “I’ve chosen this,” she said, freeing one hand from his to lay it across her belly. “I mean. It isn’t what I would have picked out of a list of anything in the universe. But it’s what happened, and I’ve chosen to, you know. Keep going, here.”

“Right,” he said, and she watched the realization cross his face that she could have easily chosen otherwise.

“Even when I thought you wanted nothing to do with it,” she reminded him. “I still chose this.”

Then she had to watch the realization cross his face that she could have elected to terminate when she’d misunderstood him and thought he’d rejected the baby. “I never would have— forgiven myself,” he said, faltering.

“You never would have known,” she said wryly. “So there’s no point beating yourself up over it.”

“True,” he said. He shook his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t— fucking let you finish your goddamn sentence. I’m sorry.”

“We’re done recapping it,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “So okay. Listen. I’ll go first, I’ll tell you what I think I want. Then you tell me what you want, and we’ll figure out where we can compromise. How’s that sound.”

“Yes,” he said, looking up hopefully. “I’d— that’s good.”

She collected herself, taking her hand from his shoulder and laying it atop their intertwined hands. “The thing about being free is that it gets tiring,” she said. “I like being able to just— pack up and move on, sometimes, but. Sometimes it just feels like running. I like the idea of a home that stays in one place.”

“We don’t have a good one right now,” Kes said anxiously. “It’s not— fancy. It’s not really— big enough for everybody. It’s kind of. It’s not nice, or sophisticated. It’s temporary and nothing’s pretty.”

“I figured,” she said. “Shh. Let me finish. Then you can tell me why my plan’s bad.”

“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean—“ but he saw her expression and stopped. She smiled at him.

“I’m just saying,” she said. “I’m willing to try coming back with you to your people. I’ll chip in for room and board and stuff, a doctor when the baby comes, all that. I saved up enough from this gig that I was planning on taking some time off with Papa. He already said he could get the start date for the next contract moved no problem, and we were starting to talk about that.”

“Of course you’ve talked to your papa about this,” Kes said, looking hollowly off into the distance.

“What?”

“He must think I’m—“ He turned wide eyes full of dread toward her. “He must think I’m awful.”

“He doesn’t know much about you,” Shara said, “but he’ll listen to whatever I say, so don’t worry about that. I said terrible things about you but he’s going to understand me when I say none of it was true.”

“Hm,” Kes said, skeptical, and looked down at their hands.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll handle him,” she said. “So I’ll come back to your people, and I figure I can afford not to work for a few months at least after the baby’s born. Papa and I were making a tentative schedule so we could switch off which of us was working all the time, and it would be pretty hard but we could do it, especially if there were a few gigs where I could bring a baby along. Sometimes they don’t care, for cargo pilots. It would be a lot easier, though, if you were in the mix. Especially if you had some people you really trust. Like— you said your mother’s alive?”

“Mama and Papa are both alive,” Kes said. “They’re not— exactly together, not like they were when I was born, but they’re both in the group.” He looked cautiously excited, a light kindled behind his eyes, and he was smiling slightly. “We have a couple of children, in the group. We could look after a baby all the time, you could work whenever you felt like it, or whenever you had a good offer.” He seemed to reconsider that. “But. I mean. We also have enough, among all of us, that if you wanted to not work for a while that would be okay. You don’t have to pay your own way.”

“I’m capable,” Shara said, bristling slightly, but smoothed it back down immediately. “I mean. I like to work. I can earn a lot.” She knew for a fact she earned at least twice what Kes did at the moment.

“You can,” he said, and he wasn’t at all upset by it. Good. Sometimes men were, to her surprise. She definitely blamed the Imperial cultural bullshit for it. “I’m just saying, you don’t have to. But if you— feel trapped, or just— want to go. You’d always be free to go, and come back when you want, and your child would be cared for, no matter what.”

“That would be ideal,” she said. The next part was hard to bring up, and she was tempted to just let it lie, but she couldn’t. So she steeled herself. “The other part is— what kind of relationship I’d have with you.”

“With me,” Kes said, blank at first, and then his expression went wary. “Oh.”

“Sometimes people get these ideas,” she said carefully. “That you have to get married. And when you get married you belong to a man, and it’s forever.”

He nodded slowly. “Well,” he said. “That’s. That’s not how my people marry. I don’t know what you want to do, but— like for my parents, they married, and I was born, and that was fine, but my mother always had Norasol as a lover, and my father was faithful to her when she wanted that, and then they agreed that he could go and do as he liked as long as he still brought money home, so he does that.” Kes wasn’t looking at her. He shrugged one shoulder. “As long as they both agreed to it, it was not a scandal. And they did.”

“Would you want to go do as you liked?” Shara asked, very carefully neutral.

He looked sharply at her, dismayed. “No,” he said. Then, softer, he said, “No, I don’t think I would like that very much. My heart doesn’t incline that way, I don’t think.” He looked down at his hands, fiddling with the bandages on his thumb. “Norasol makes fun of me for it but I want very much to just be with one person. I don’t like to— sleep around.”

Shara nodded. She liked the sound of that. “What if I didn’t feel that way?” she asked carefully.

His shoulders went up very slightly, but he didn’t look at her. “That— that would be all right,” he said. “I don’t— if you always came back to me I would be happy.”

“I don’t think you would really be happy with that,” she said, watching him keenly.

He probed his lower teeth with his tongue, staring fixedly ahead. “I would take what I could get,” he admitted. He darted a look toward her, but away before she could catch his eye, his head staying motionless and only his eyes moving. “If you wanted to be free, but came back to me sometimes, that would be enough.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I am sure,” he said.

“Why should I get what I want over you getting what you want?” she asked.

“Because if you give me a child I won’t ask you for anything else,” Kes said. “And what you want and what I want mostly overlap in that respect, so—“ He shrugged. “If I’m not enough for you, then I’m not, and if that’s a problem you can solve, then you should.”

“I don’t think I would want that,” she said, relenting.

His shoulders pulled up, and his chin tucked down a little. “Oh,” he said. “Well. That’s. Okay too.”

“No,” she said, “I mean— I mean I don’t want anybody else either.”

He blinked, staring straight ahead. “Oh,” he said again. She waited, and finally he looked at her, eyes flat and wary. “You mean you do or you don’t want— me.”

“I do,” she said. “I want you.”

She was in bad trouble, she knew she was, because watching his face cautiously light up from within almost made her cry. “Really?” he said.

She bit her lip and nodded. “I’d already realized,” she said, “before I found out about,” and she gestured to her belly, “that I was going to have a lot of trouble letting go of you. I’m not— anywhere near as cool as I pretend I am.”

He laughed, and it was a short sharp laugh but she’d take it anyway, the way it softened the planes of his features. “You’re still cooler than me,” he said.

She laughed, and hers was maybe a little sharp too, almost vicious with relief. He bit his lip, looking at where his fingers were all wrapped through hers, and she leaned over and kissed him.

“At least I know,” he said breathlessly, after a couple minutes of that, “that I’m good at something.”

She laughed, and got his shirt off him, and they rolled around a little, but something was bothering him about what he’d said and finally she managed to pin down the thought, as she pinned him down and looked down into his face. “You know you’re more to me than just sex,” she said. “The sex is great but you’re more than that.”

He looked, well— his smile slid from shyly pleased to fucking delighted as he worked her open with his fingers, and he said, “I have no higher ambition than that.”

“Well,” she said, and she was turned on enough that she couldn’t really think all that clearly now, “I mean, it’s not nothing, but— oh, _oh_ ,” he was really good at finding just the right angle and pressure, and she lost the power of speech and clung onto his shoulders for a few moments, shuddering to a climax.

He kissed her sweetly and rolled them both over, and it took her a moment to collect herself. He’d already lavished a fair bit of gentle, respectful attention on her breasts, and was kissing her sternum. She put her hands in his hair.

“I want,” he said, and she combed her fingers through his hair encouragingly.

“It’s okay,” she said, when he didn’t go on. “Nothing is really all that different.”

“Are you kidding?” he said, but he was grinning as he looked up at her. “Everything is different!”

“Well,” she said, a little shyly. “Yes. But I mean. Unless you meant that before you were trying to impress me and now you feel like you don’t have to bother.”

He laughed, and lowered his head to nuzzle at her breasts again. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant. Maybe the opposite though. If I don’t have to always be thinking about when you leave me maybe I can really focus, you know?”

“Oh,” she said, and it was really only then that it hit her that she didn’t have to start counting down until she left either. She didn’t have to fight against being wistful when she looked at him. Maybe she still had to hold on to some little part of her heart in case it all went wrong and horrible, but really, there wasn’t much point anymore. Her body had decided for her, and let him in. “Oh,” she said, and wrapped her arms around his head.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Kes being from an indigenous nation decimated by genocide and forced off their land by corporate interests is, of course, inspired by the plight of the Mayan peoples of Central America, and _that_ idea was naturally sparked by the actor portraying Poe Dameron, Oscar Isaac, being himself a native of Guatemala.  
>  But it is important to note that the Mayans are _not_ a vanished nation; many of them survived the genocide of the 1990s, and they are still living and still fighting. It is crucial not to erase them, not to let ourselves think sadly of them as some relic of the past-- they are still there, they are still fighting against those same corporate interests, telling their stories in their own words and trying to live in their own ways.  
>  I have taken their story as inspiration, but they do have a story of their own and they are still telling it. I highly recommend the writings of [Rigoberta Menchu](https://www.google.com/search?q=rigoberta+menchu&oq=rigoberta+menchu&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i65j69i60.3095j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) as a starting point; it's not light reading but it's compelling.  
> And again I reiterate-- they are still alive, they are not vanished, they are not vanquished, they are still living, and they have their own stories to tell.


End file.
